lucaspa

It's not the time. It's that NS keeps track of hundreds/thousands of variables and balances cost/benefit analyses of each. Humans don't do that. When you talk of gengineering humans, you pick only 3-4 traits you want to change. No,the point was to make the genetic algorithm like NS. The human input is the environment in which the selection takes place. In nature, NS also has a "fitness algorithm". It's sometimes described as the "fitness peak" by evolutionary biologists. Remember, the individuals who survive and replicate have the best designs in that generation. Designs to fit the design problem posed by the environment. Selection is not arbitrary. That's the whole point of natural selection. The individuals who do best in the competition for scarce resources are the ones selected. And here I thought you were arguing that genetic algorithms are not natural selection! Now you say they are. I wish you'd make up your mind. Rather than this, I would say that both genetic algorithms and natural selection are Darwinian selection in their respective substrates. Think back to when you were first learning math. There were many possible answers you could provide for 1 + 1 = 2 (and you can find many of those on tests of 1st graders!) but the environment meant that you selected "2" each time because that was the "correct" answer. Now, of course, this is memorized and so you select that answer every time. When you were learning physics, you did have to select the correct physics equation in the appropriate environment -- problem you were facing. And, I bet, on some tests you chose the wrong equation for some of the problems. But then, you had already done some selecting in the environment of physics problems as you did practice problems. So now, in a particular environment, you go back to the selection that worked before. Think about a baby. It makes random noises until it hits upon variations that elicit a positive response in the environment -- parents and other people. "mama" and "dada" are usually the first words. That environment might be provided by a parent. But when the baby in the variations hits the correct sound, it gets selected. And that continues as more and more words are learned. Many are initially mispronounced. My daughter did "elphedent" for a few days. Positive environment at home but a different environment at day-care. So she selected "elephant" instead. Remember, Darwinian selection is cumulative. It builds. So by the time you hit school you already have selected a basic vocabulary. Now comes new selection of proper spelling and grammar. So as I write these sentences I am building upon all the cumulative selection that has gone before as I choose the sentences I make in my imagination to say what I want to say (the environment I am selecting in). As I said, Darwinian selection is cumulative. So yes, when part of the design fits the environment we stop tinkering with it. So does natural selection. And how fast can our brains compute? Also, I think you think we have to do everything from scratch. In designing these sentences, I already have the grammar and spelling down. I even have previous sentences I have written to get similar meanings down. I don't have to go back to random variations of sound, but just variations in the words and order from a limited set of them. Good to hear. And I said that NS is more competent than we are. No, genetic drift is different from natural selection. Genetic drift is pure chance. When the ways that a Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium can be disturbed, genetic drift is separate from natural selection: which it is. A selection algorithm will NOT fix a deleterious mutation. But a lot of variation comes by recombination. However, saying that genetic algorithms can have a higher variation rate is a difference in degree, not kind. It doesn't make genetic algorithms qualitatively different from natural selection. Perhaps, but again a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. And, as I pointed out in another thread, if the population is "large" (over 100) it is unlikely that beneficial variations will be lost. As we know, 100 is not all that large for any population. So? Quantitative difference, not qualitative. Which means that the designing is all on its own! Which is the point. Humans aren't doing the designing, Darwinian selection is. The cases I've seen, humans have not done any interferring by non-random permutations. I'm saying that both genetic algorithms and natural selection are substrates of Darwinian selection. Whereupon I question our objectives. I was thinking of genetic engineering in humans. That has been a failure so far. What you call "improvements" are exactly the problem I am raising for humans: those crops do exactly what we want in a very controlled environment. Change the environment and those crops are toast. Even then, some of our genetically engineered crops are susceptible to diseases we didn't anticipate. So yes, genetically engineer corn or cotton because, if those varieties go extinct, we haven't lost anything. But do this to ourselves and the environment changes and we lose the human species. OUR species! The risk I'll accept for crop species is not a risk I think we should entertain for our own species. Don't think so. Again, remember Thompson. There are some things humans are not good at. We can't keep track of the thousands of cost/benefit relationships that interact. We can't even get a computer to do it, much less our brains. We can modify some few traits in plants and animals but, again, if we lose those it's OK. Losing the human species to your hubris is just too much to risk. This is the limitation of human imagination I was referring to. We may not make totally random designs in our imagination. And that may be our undoing because we miss good designs due to our limited imaginations. Our best human designers are the ones that can think "out of the box", right? That means they are ones that come closest to making "random" designs. Ones that more conventional people don't. Darwinian selection, by using "random" variations, is more likely than us to hit upon really novel designs. Which may be why we turn to Darwinian selection when we are stumped. No, it's because the other method does not work, as you noted. It has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with competence. When our Darwinian selection doesn't work we turn to genetic algorithms. In terms of "efficiency", you don't know how fast our brains operate and therefore how many variations we flash thru in a second in our own Darwinian selection. You should be careful about throwing around that word. Especially when you haven't read the article! The "fitness function" was recognition of a spoken word! Not a mathematical function, but an actual operation in the real world. Here, I'll quote from the article: "Thompson realised that he could use a standard genetic algorithm to evolve a configuration program for an FPGA and then test each new circuit design immediately on the chip. He set the system a task that appeared impossible for a human designer. Using only 100 logic cells, evolution had to come up with a circuit that could discriminate between two tones, one at 1 kilohertz and the other at 10 kilohertz. To kick off the experiment, Thompson created a population of 50 configuration programs on a computer, each consisting of a random string of 1s and 0s. The computer downloaded each program in turn to the FPGA to create its circuit and then played it the test tones (see Diagram, below). ... By generation 2800, the fittest circuit was discriminating accurately between the two inputs, but there were still glitches in its output. These only disappeared completely at generation 4100. After this, there were no further changes. Once the FPGA could discriminate between the two tones, it was fairly easy to continue the evolutionary process until the circuit could detect the more finely modulated differences between the spoken words "go" and "stop". So how did evolution do it? If a human designer, steeped in digital lore, were to tackle the same problem, one component would have been essential--a clock. The transistors inside a chip need time to flip between on and off, so the clock is set to keep everything marching in step, ensuring that no transistor produces an output between 0 and 1. A human designer would also use the clock to count the number of ticks between the peaks of the waves of the input tones. There would be 10 times as many ticks between the wave peaks of the 1 kilohertz tone as those of the 10 kilohertz tone. In order to ensure that his circuit came up with a unique result, Thompson deliberately left a clock out of the primordial soup of components from which the circuit evolved. Of course, a clock could have evolved. The simplest would probably be a "ring oscillator"--a circle of cells that change their output every time a signal passes through. It generates a sequence of 1s and 0s rather like the ticks of a clock. But Thompson reckoned that a ring oscillator was unlikely to evolve because it would need far more than the 100 cells available. So how did evolution do it--and without a clock? When he looked at the final circuit, Thompson found the input signal routed through a complex assortment of feedback loops. He believes that these probably create modified and time-delayed versions of the signal that interfere with the original signal in a way that enables the circuit to discriminate between the two tones. "But really, I don't have the faintest idea how it works," he says. ... That repertoire turns out to be more intriguing than Thompson could have imagined. Although the configuration program specified tasks for all 100 cells, it transpired that only 32 were essential to the circuit's operation. Thompson could bypass the other cells without affecting it. A further five cells appeared to serve no logical purpose at all--there was no route of connections by which they could influence the output. And yet if he disconnected them, the circuit stopped working. It appears that evolution made use of some physical property of these cells--possibly a capacitive effect or electromagnetic inductance--to influence a signal passing nearby. Somehow, it seized on this subtle effect and incorporated it into the solution." "It wasn't just efficient, the chip's performance was downright weird. The current through the chip was feeding back and forth through the gates, "swirling around," says Thompson, and then mov-ing on. Nothing at all like the ordered path that current might take in a human-designed chip. And of the 32 cells being used, some seemed to be out of the loop. Although they weren't directly tied to the main circuit, they were affecting the per-formance of the chip. This is what Thompson calls "the crazy thing about it" Thompson gradually narrowed the possible explanations down to a handful of phenomena. The most likely is known as electromagnetic coupling, which means the cells on the chip are so close to each other that they could, in effect, broadcast radio signals between them-selves without sending current down the interconnecting wires. Chip designers, aware of the potential for electromag-netic coupling between adjacent compo-nents on their chips, go out of their way to design their circuits so that it won't af-fect the performance. In Thompson's case, evolution seems to have discovered the phenomenon and put it to work. It was also possible that the cells were communicating through the power-supply wiring. Each cell was hooked in-dependently to the power supply; a rapidly changing voltage in one cell would subtly affect the power supply, which might feed back to another cell. And the cells may have been communi-cating through the silicon substrate on which the circuit is laid down. "The cir-cuit is a very thin layer on top of a thicker piece of silicon," Thompson ex-plains, "where the transistors are dif-fused into just the top surface part. It's just possible that there's an interaction through the substrate, if they're doing something very strange. But the point is, they are doing something really strange, and evolution is using all of it, all these weird effects as part of its system." Notice that Thompson has only "most likely" explanation. He doesn't know. Now, I'll let the ad hominem pass -- this once. Next time you use the word "liar" I'll report you. I noticed you used the word "want". I asked why we needed genetic changes. You responded with want. Different things. We don't need to be "faster, stronger, smarter, glow in the dark, have gills, redesign to live in zero gravity". We have technology that will do all that. IOW, you want to play god with the human species. You want to shape them in your image -- because you want to. Never mind the good of the species. How naive! What you are doing is replacing ALL the alleles with the ones you want. You are reducing variation, not increasing it. And again, "very good variability" is only within your narrow parameters of what is "good". Other examples of where Darwinian selection was used when the design problem was too tough for humans to solve: 1. MJ Plunkett and JA Ellman, Combinatorial chemistry and new drugs. Scientific American, 276: 68-73, April 1997. Summary of article: "By harnessing the creative power of Darwinian selection inside a test tube, chemists can now discover compounds they would not have known how to make. The key is combinatorial chemistry, a process that allows them to produce and screen millions of candidate molecules quickly and systematically." 2. GF Joyce, Directed molecular evolution. Scientific American 267: 90-97,July 1994. 3. AI Samuel, Some studies on machine learning using the game of checkers. IBM Journal of Research Development, 3: 211-219, 1964. Reprinted in EA Feigenbaum and J Feldman, Computers and Thought, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964 pp 71-105. 6. CW Petit, Touched by nature: putting evolution to work on the assembly line. US News and World Report, 125: 43-45, July 27, 1998. Use "genetic algorithms" (cumulative selection) to get design in industry. Boeing engineers had cumulative selection design a wing forthem for a jet to carry 600 passengers but have a wing the same size as a 747. 9. FS Santiago, HC Lowe, MM Kavurma, CN Chesterman, A Baker, DG Atkins,LM Khachigian, New DNA enzyme targeting Egr-1 mRNA inhibits vascular smooth muscle proliferation and regrowth after injury. Nature Medicine 5:1264-1269, 1999. Used Darwinian selection to design a DNA enzyme (not found in nature) that degrades mRNA for use in treating hyperplasia after balloon arthroplasty. Humans have no idea what the nucleotide sequence of the DNA enzyme because they didn't make it --Darwinian selection did. 10. Breaker RR, Joyce GF.A DNA enzyme that cleaves RNA. Chem Biol 1994 Dec;1(4):223-9 11. Ronald R Breaker, Gerald FA Joyce DNA enzyme with Mg2+-dependent RNA phosphoesterase activity Chemistry & Biology 1995, 2:655-660. You'll especially like this one: 13. http://www.discover.com/aug_03/gthere.html?article=feattech.html Use of Darwinian selection to evolve of the ability to think in computers. If humans think so well, why use Darwinian selection to get the ability to think in computers? 14. Jr Koza, MA Keane, MJ Streeter, Evolving inventions. Scientific American, 52-59, Feb 2003 check out http://www.genetic-programming.com 15. A. Thompson, P. Layzell and R. S. Zebulum Explorations in Design Space: Unconventional electronics design through artificial evolution. IEEE Trans. Evol. Comp., Vol 3, No 3, (1999) http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/adrianth/TEC99/paper.html Natural selection promotes variation. You need to read Chapters 14, 15, and 22 in Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology for all the details. Or start a new thread. Genetic engineering decreases variations within populations. After all, every individual has the same genetically engineered alleles. Then you are not promoting genetic engineering. Tell me, do genetically engineering crops have more variation than wild type? Of course not. Because the alleles in every individual is replaced. If you are going to introduce alleles for "faster, smarter, stronger", then isn't everyone going to have them? Would you restrict them to a few? How would you do that? If not restricted, then everyone would have to have them in order to be equal in the society, wouldn't they? Wouldn't there be job discrimination against those individuals without the "smarter" alleles? So what do you plan, several subpopulations of humans? One with gills, one with alleles for low gravity, one that can glow in the dark? Then there goes your "increased variation" argument, doesn't it? Everyone would have the alleles. Less variation. Yes, it's possible we might go extinct. But the odds are much, much less if we let natural selection keep the variation -- and thus our ability to use lots of environments -- rather than engineer us into one niche. So we are all adapted to zero g and we lose space travel. How do those individuals live in a gravity well? I've said this before and you didn't respond. To get smarter means a bigger brain or more brain cells packed into a smaller volume. Either way, the brain's requirement for energy would go up. That's OK now in our environment of plenty of food. But suppose global warming does play havoc with crops and suddenly we have a lot less food. Now we have everyone needing more calories per day than they did and the calories are not available. Congrats. You have put H. sapiens into a situation where it starves! Whereas if we had NOT gene engineered, there would have been a few people who may be "dumb" but could survive on fewer calories and thus, H. sapiens survives. 1. Natural selection does not plan long term, but neither is the genetic engineering being advocated by Mr. Skeptic. 2. NS does have a short term plan -- adaptation to the environment. Since it can't predict future environments, there is no long term plan. 3. The argument is that NS is less likely to push H. sapiens into an evolutionary dead end than genetic engineering is. Where we have used genetic engineering on crops, we are pushing them to an evolutionary dead end. We keep them going by our technology. Natural selection is always there. Like you say drift is always there. I know of no case where natural selectionis "overwhelmed" by drift. Even in founder effects, where N=2, natural selection still works to adapt the population. Darwinian selection is being used for the process whereever it occurs. As Dennet shows in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Darwinian selection is an algorithm to get design. Natural selection is one application of Darwinian selection and, yes, it is responsible for all adaptations (which are designs). I am claiming that human design is Darwinian selection operating within a brain.

You are better off seeing the lion first. So the preference is remaining vigilant. Remember, the lion doesn't have to see you; it can smell or hear you. However, the primary sense for apes is sight. So make the best use of that sight. If you have to run, then bipedality is faster than knuckle walking. And, of course, bipedality favors going long distances over knuckle walking. So just moving about away from trees to forage for food may have been a stronger selective factor than avoiding predators. Back to the OP. Basically, we don't know for sure. The data indicates that bipedality evolved first in the hominid lineage, long before large brains. As you point out below: Yet, as I recall, ramidus shows some adaptations for bipedality. So why? "Efficient bipedal movement" is different from "first bipedal". The selection pressure to get bipedality to begin with doesn't have to be the same selection pressure(s) for evolution of efficient bipedal movement. Bipedality could be partly an exaptation. Once bipedal, then that conferred new abilities unrelated to the pressure to become bipedal to begin with. I would agree. All we can do is list the various hypotheses that have been proposed and the caveat that we don't have enough data to choose between them. The idea the bipedality arose by swimming can be falsified, but the others are on the table. First, the fossil evidence is not present. Early hominid fossils are not found near water or in aquatic environments. If early humans spent a lot of time in the water, then we would expect some of them to drown or be eaten by water-borne predators such that the bones would be found in sediments that had once been streams or lakees. We don't. All the hominid fossils so far have been found on what was once dry land or in run-offs from streams. The famous cache of A. africanus fossils in S. Africa were killed by land dwelling predators and dropped between bolders in a semi-arid savannah. Second, the aquatic ape theory does not explain all the questions about human evolution. What you have is a selective list. As just one example, most aquatic mammals have hair! Only a few -- such as the hippo -- do not. All the aquatic primates have hair! There are other adaptations that are not explained by aquatic ape. http://www.aquaticape.org/ Langdon JH (1997). "Umbrella hypotheses and parsimony in human evolution: a critique of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis". J. Hum. Evol. 33 (4): 479–94. doi:10.1006/jhev.1997.0146. PMID 9361254 Pagel, Mark (2003). "A naked ape would have fewer parasites". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 270 (0, 07 Aug 2003): S117. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2003.0041. (inactive 2008-06-25). http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Aquatic_ape_theory No good. Aquatic ape says that our ancestors of 5-7 million years ago went thru an aquatic phase. Australopithecines are 2-4 million years ago. By that time, the adaptations should already have happened according to Aquatic Ape. As CDarwin noted, Australopithecines don't have the adaptations prediced by AA.

I'm comparing the ability to design, not overall "intelligence". In this area, NS is a "smarter" designer than we are. I think you have taken the term "smarter" and applied it to "intelligence" in general, instead of the narrow area I intended. So I hope I have cleared that up: when I say "NS is smarter than we are" I am referring to the specific area of making designs. No, it's not a different algorithm. The whole point of the algorithm was to make it identical with NS. The only difference is that humans set the environment, instead of nature. But the variation, selection, and inheritance are what is found in nature. BTW, you do realize that NS is an algorithm, right? What I am saying is that humans design by Darwinian selection. As I said "Darwinian selection is the ONLY method for gettting design. The issue is whether it happens within a brain or outside of one. Human design -- including that of the DNA sequences to insert -- is Darwinian selection." Yes, we design by Darwinian selection. But we don't do it as well as NS (Darwinian selection) working outside our brain does. I think the reason is the generation of variation. Our variations come from our imagination, and our imagination is limited. No. I had said what I just ended the last paragraph with: our imagination to generate variation is limited. NS doesn't have such a limit on the generation of variation. You seem to have some misconceptions about NS. 1. Efficiency is different than competence. 2. And selection can work very fast. Recent studies in the lab and the wild show that directional NS can work at rates >10,000x faster than we generally see in the fossil record. This raises the question: why is NS so slow in the fossil record? I think the answer lies in purifying selection keeping fit populations stable. 3. No, unfavorable variations are not picked by natural selection! Slightly deleterious mutations can be fixed by genetic drift, but not by NS. 4. Mutation rates vary. They are lowest in bacteria and highest in humans. In humans the mutation rate is about 20 per individual. NS also remembers the best permutations -- that is what inheritance is. And some biological systems have incredibly high mutation rates. IN fact, in some cases an increased mutation rate is itself selected for. 1. These are differences in details, not differences in kind. Population sizes and selection pressures are part of natural selection. 2. It most definitely is not "guided" by humans. Humans set up the system and then let it work. No tinkering. If the system was guided by humans, then humans would know how the end product worked! 3. That Darwinian selection can be used in many venues is the hallmark of an algorithm. That's why I try to use Darwinian selection as the general term and natural selection as referring to what happens in nature in living organisms. However, I have sometimes confused the terms and used natural selection when I could have said Darwinian selection. 4. Remember that this discussion started because you advocated genetic engineering on H. sapiens! You wanted to do evolution in living things. So the situation you set up put human designs in direct competition with natural selection. Again, I'm afraid you made a generalization (and therefore accidentally a strawman) I did not make nor intend to make. You took the word "smarter" out of the context I was using it -- design and particularly genetically designing humans (your original context) -- and made it about "intelligence". Yes, our minds probably work by neural nets. But we design by Darwinian selection. We use the neural nets as the computer to generate variations (in designs) and test them. I notice in the literature that humans are using Darwinian selection to design computer analogs to the human brain so that they can get machine intelligence. Mr. Skeptic, you have never addressed the core of my argument: IF humans were better designers than NS (Darwinian selection), then why do we use Darwinian selection when the design problem is too tough for us? Why, after we use Darwinian selection, do we end up with designs that we don't know how they work? If we were smarter designers, we wouldn't have to use Darwinian selection, would we? And, having used it, our superior design skills (and intelligence) would be able to tell us how the design worked. Thompson still doesn't know how the chip works. It appears to use principles of physics we humans haven't discovered yet. Foodchain, I'm really puzzled by your post. Could you try again? Mr. Skeptic started the thread because he is a champion of genetic modification of humans. He very much wants to use genetic engineering to change H. sapiens to make us, what was it?, "faster, stronger, smarter". So he wants to re-design H. sapiens. Why we need to be redesigned at the genetic level is not clear. One of my objections to this is based on the data that natural selection is a better designer than we are. Pre-empting natural selection to letting humans design H. sapiens strikes me as ultimately a very stupid idea. I agree. And this is one of my objections to Mr. Skeptic's advocacy of wholesale genetic engineering to change H. sapiens. He doesn't advocate eugenics so much (which is artificial selection) but genetic engineering. He wants us to consciously change the DNA to make H. sapiens "better". This approach also reduces genetic diversity (variation) by having everyone have the same alleles so that they are all the same intelligence or physical attributes. As you noted, we don't know enough about the current environmnent, much less future ones, to try this approach. I can easily see us gengineering H. sapiens to a situation where a sudden change in the environment renders H. sapiens extinct. We wouldn't have the variation among individuals so that some individuals would survive because they were lucky enough to have the appropriate variations for the new environment.

There is no "balance of nature". Basically, viruses can earn a living by coopting the machinery of cells to make copies of themselves. They can reproduce that way. The "purpose" of any living being is to earn a living and reproduce. Viruses do that. I think what bothers you is that viruses are viewed as a "disease" while most other species are not. Not all viruses kill their hosts. In fact, there is co-evolution of viruses and hosts so that the virus is less deadly. After all, a virus that kills the host creates a problem for itself: the source of its metabolism is dead and the virus will die. So viruses evolve to be less deadly. In humans, many became childhood diseases: whooping cough, measles, etc. The influenza virus does not kill its host; neither does the cold virus. No. About 10% of our DNA is ALU repeats, which are transposons. They may, originally, have been a retroviral insertion but they have propagated on their own since then. Otherwise, very little of our DNA is due to retroviruses and, as someone pointed out, most of that is non-coding DNA.

As Ecoli pointed out, remember, this is type 2 diabetes. Not type 1. Type 1 is an autoimmune disease and this surgery won't touch it. Since the insulin-producing cells have been destroyed, there needs to be some way to replace them. For type 2, we'll have to wait and see. Maybe. The news report was very vague on mechanisms -- not surprising for surgeons. Based on what Blike said and the physiology, I would hypothesize that this particular area of the duodenum produces some type of inhibitor of insulin. Bypass the area and you reduce the inhibitor, allowing the normal insulin to work again.

I would call it a cure, not a compromise. Screening, as I think about it, is a form of eugenics. Fetuses that have T-S are aborted. That means all the other alleles are lost, too. I dont' think germ-line would work. Instead, if you could change just that one gene in a fertilized ovum or the blastocyst, then the individual would not have it -- including its germ line. This, IMO, is the legitimate area of ES cell research. First, Lenski isn't doing artificial selection. What is happening in his cultures is natural selection. He didn't "set up" his experiment for anaerobic citrate metabolism. He set the experiment up for bacteria to evolve by natural selection or genetic drift. It's just that there was an unused food source in the environment. Lenski didn't do any selecting for individual bacteria that were able to make use of that resource. Second, what people call it and what it really is can be 2 different things. We are looking at what the situation really is. By the definitions used, artificial selection = eugenics on other species. Instead of members of the same species deciding what the "desirable traits" are, the decision is made by a member of another species. Because morals don't apply outside your own secies. Morals are a decision on how to treat members of your own species. EVERY species exploits others to a greater or lesser extent. Let's face it, all animals exploit (eventually) plants for food. Artificial selection is another form of exploitation. Humans, because of their technology, are better at the exploitation than other species and do so at a conscious level. But a beaver (to use but one example) selecting trees to fell in order to create a dam (and the pond behind it) are exploiting the trees and changing the habitat to suit themselves. I suspect, if we looked into it, that beavers prefer certain types, sizes, and shape of trunk in the trees they cut down. That is a form of artificial selection. Not conscious on the part of beavers, of course, but they are selecting. Are they immoral?

I know. I was agreeing with you. Eugenics may start out as eliminating diseases -- such as preventing people with Tay Sach's from having children -- but it won't stop there. But even in the case of Tay Sach's, with eugenics you lose all the alleles of those persons, and many of those alleles are going to be very valuable. You realize that artificial selection = eugenics, right? Eugenics is artificial selection applied to humans. As you said "Eugenics however is not the eradication of genetic disease, it is the selection of desirable traits by another person." Artificial selection is the selection of "desirable traits" in other species by humans. So we practice eugenics on other species. And yes, we can change them and get sweet corn from maize and Labradors from wolves. But in both cases a lot of genetic diversity has been lost and both corn and Labs can only survive in the artificial environment humans provide. Since we cannot guarantee that sort of control over future environments, do you really want to practice artificial selection/eugenics on humans? And yes, we are "clever" in artficial selection in terms of getting what we want. But we are still a lot dumber than natural selection in terms of sorting thru all the traits to get a good balance. Instead, we focus on just a few, because that is all we can handle.

I don't know where that is done. Drugs that are used to treat fatal diseases (such as cancer drugs) routinely undergo Phase I clinical trials in patients in the terminal phase of the disease. That is, when all other treatments have failed and it is anticipated that the patient will die if not treated.

That's the same argument. Remember, the question is: is it ethical for scientists to work with human ES cells? That's "try". The ethical argument for trying is the possibility of curing human disease. But, in order to try with human ES cells, you have to destroy a blastocyst. If you consider that a person (#3), then it isn't ethical to try. Just as it wasn't ethical for Nazi scientists to try to find tolerance to various gasses by exposing Jewish prisoners to them and having them die. We don't consider it ethical to deliberately kill a person in the course of scientific research. Perhaps you meant to apply your argument narrowly to just #2 and the objection that adult stem cells would be able to do what ES cells do: However, that is not a counter to #3. Many of the people arguing #3 do not allow the exception to save the lives of thousands. For them, you have to directly challenge the underlying assumption that a fertilized ovum is a person. However, another counter to your argument is that research can be done to test the potential of ES cells in general to treat diseases. Remember, there are no restrictions on obtaining ES cells from animals and there are animal models of diseases. Therefore the potential of ES cells to cure diseases can be tested in animals even if there is a human ban. You might then use that research to support ethical argument #2. However, if you search the literature, you find something very strange. There are thousands of papers using adult stem cells to treat diseases in animals -- including many clinical trials in humans. There are less than 20 papers using ES cells to treat diseases in animal models and these are in only a few fields: cardiac regeneration, spinal cord regeneration, and some hematological work. All three offer hundreds of papers using adult stem cells, including at least 5 human clinical trials in the cardiac area. So what we have for adherents to argument #2 is that the argument is all hype and isn't based on data! A flaw in the argument is that you can legitimately ask: where are all these miracle cures in the animal models scientists require before they can move to human trials? It's the argument of the ES cell community. They implicitly agreed to the premise of #3 but used the ethical positions 1) the embryos would be discarded anyway (leftover from in vitro fertilization) and 2) that ES cells would save thousands of lives. The first one took a hit when the ES cell community decided that they needed ES cells from the same individual to avoid immune rejection. That led them to somatic nuclear cell transfer (cloning) but with the knowledge that the blastocyst was being created only to have ES cells harvested. To those adhering to #3, that meant killing a person. Of course, there were other ethical concerns raised -- the source of the ova to do the cloning. Not nearly enough ova around for all the potential patients using ES cell therapy. Many in the ES cell community think the ethical issues have been circumvented by induced pluripotent cells (iPS), where ES cells are generated by transducing 4 genes into adult cells. BTW, a recent paper used iPS cells to cure a mouse model of sickle cell anemia. So the iPS people started out early showing the efficacy of iPS cells on particular diseases. They didn't rely on just hype like the ES cell people did.

First, Darwinian selection is more than "trial and error". That is a demeaning soundbite. Second, that "trial and error" is how humans design! Whether you realize it or not, the program of human designed genetic changes still relies on Darwinian selection -- "trial and error". Darwinian selection is the ONLY method for gettting design. The issue is whether it happens within a brain or outside of one. Human design -- including that of the DNA sequences to insert -- is Darwinian selection. Basically, within your brain you generate variations with your imagination and then run them thru selection against what you want. You pick the ones that seem to fit the criteria (will "work") and then make variations on those in your imagination and test them. Finally, at some point you decide to manufacture what you consider the best design. And then that gets tested in the real world instead of your imagination. In the case of DNA sequences, that real world would be the first individuals with the new sequences (genes). And then we find out if there are unanticipated effects on that trait or interactions with other traits (polygenic and pleiotrophic). Then you begin the imaginative process again by imagining new variations within your brain. So yeah, the power of Darwinian selection is amazing. Remember what Thompson said: human imagination is limited. There are some things that human engineers have a difficulty including. Natural selection doesn't have that limitation. Which means it is only a matter of time before what are "desirable traits by another person" = racism. Eugenics is predicated on the assumption that humans are as smart as natural selection. The data says this assumption is wrong.

they never did. Talk to PhDP about the probability of a beneficial mutation being fixed. It is not 1. There is a thing called "nonselective mortality". And culture is part of the environment! It is part of selecting for genetic variation. Because you aren't nearly as smart as natural selection! So? That is not necessarily "better". This shows that you don't understand evolution and natural selection. You are assuming that some traits are always "better". Not so. Whether a trait is "good" or "bad" depends on the environment. Change the environment and you change the trait from beneficial to deleterious, and vice versa. You are also forgetting that most traits are polygenic and that everything comes with a cost as well as a benefit. What are the costs of increased intelligence? For one, you need a larger brain and that requires more energy. That's fine as long as you are in a situation where there is abundant food. But change the environment to one of limited food and the larger brained people starve! If you've changed everyone what you have now done is make H. sapiens exinct! Any large population is at an evolutionary standstill. That's what "stasis" is all about! Yeah, but that tweaking depends on that limited intelligence. I don't want to put the future of the species in the hands of people with as limited intelligence as you've displayed.

I think Eugenics is just stupid. It is based on faulty science -- in this case faulty evolutionary biology and natural selection. The basis of eugenics is that some traits are always "good" and should be encouraged and some traits are always "bad" and should be eliminated. In evolution, traits are "good" or "bad" depending on the environment. Each trait comes with a cost as well as a benefit. Natural selection is constantly evaluating the cost vs benefit of multiple traits and how they interact. So eugenics assumes that we are smarter than natural selection. However, the data emphatically says we are are not. We turn to natural selection (in the form of genetic algorithms) when the design problem is too tough for us and we have no idea how to make something. We let natural selection do the designing for us. And we often end up with designs that we can't even figure out how they work, much less would have known how to make them. "I'm really exploring what evolution can do that humans can't," he [Thompson] explains. "There are properties that humans have great trouble designing into a system, like being very efficient, using small amounts of power, or being fault tolerant. Evolution can cope with them all." Evolving A Conscious Machine BY Gary Taubes Discover 19: 72-79, July 1998 Now, if natural selection is better than us at relatively simple electrical engineering problems, why would anyone think that we would be better at natural selection in the much more complicated area of the entire human genome? Yet that is exactly what eugenicists do think.

This isn't about "science" winning. We are all agreed that some science ethically should not be done. For instance, everyone agrees that doing science to find a more lethal, airborne strain of Ebola is unethical. What we have is an ethical debate, not a "scientific" one. Embryonic stem cells (ES cells) possibly can cure some diseases. Whether we ought to use them to cure diseases is an ethical decision. So, what we have to do is look at the ethical positions being stated. 1. The 5 day old blastocysts used as sources of ES cells are not "people" in the ethical, legal sense. Therefore there are no ethical issues to harvesting those cells. 2. The 5 day old blastocysts are people. However, it is permissible to sacrifice one person to save many. Therefore it is ethical to "kill" these people in order to save thousands/millions with eventually fatal diseases. This is the actual ethical argument used by ES cell researchers. Notice that there is an unstated position about ES cells: ES cells and only ES cells can do the job. No other stem cell -- such as adult stem cells -- can do the jobs proposed for ES cells. 3. Being a person starts at the moment of conception. Therefore harvesting ES cells is killing someone. The potential benefit of doing so is not worth the death of the person. What you have to decide is which ethical position you have. Then you can begin rationally looking at the merits and flaws of the other ethical positions. This is an ethical debate. However, notice that position #2 has a hidden scientific statement in it: the limits on the potential of adult stem cells.

Can you name a scientist who has harmed animals for "fun"? The current regulations (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees) were put in place because some scientists designed some poor experiments and did not use adequate analgesics or anesthetics. For instance, the famous video of making burns on pigs by waving a blowtorch over the skin comes to mind. Now, doing research on treatments for severe burns is fine. However, that was not the way to make a burn. It was not reproducible from animal to animal. What was needed was a piece of iron heated to the same temperature and applied to the same area of skin for the same length of time for each animal. With the animal sedated at the time and given pain-killers afterward. With that protocol, there are several necessary and valuable studies to be done: looking at the cellular, biochemical, and molecular events of burns and "healing"'; having a standard burn model to try treatments upon, etc. I really don't think you are aware of the regulations in place currently on the use of animals in research. If you want, I'll attach the forms I have to fill out before I can do research on animals. Each investigator must have his research approved by the IACUC, which consists of scientists and non-scientist members of the community. The purpose of the IACUC is to ensure that the animals are used to develop treatments for diseases and are adequately protected from pain, not to rubberstamp the researcher. As a member of an IACUC, we shut down the research of a scientist for not taking proper care of his animals. It's not entirely "subjective". We can define what ethical principles we agree on (and these are not derived "subjectively", either) and then reason to conclusions. Moo, there are oversight entities involved -- IACUCs, FDA, and the Dept. of Agriculture. What you need to do is get specific and document "some companies" and "brutal". Then we can figure out where the oversight broke down. What I find is that a lot of the emotion against using animals for testing comes from examples that are stated but do not exist. Some of the examples are outdated. They did exist but were the reasons regulations and IACUCs were established; to eliminate those situations.

Evolution, no. But adaptation does = variation + selection. Genetic drift can change populations, but it won't give adaptations. Actually, if you look at natural populations, s is often > 0.1. And s = 0.1 is already a "large" s. For a long time evolutionary biologists thought that most s were 0.01 or less. So, I don't know where Lynch got his data. We should compare sources (the original peer-reviewed papers) from Futuyma and Lynch. If s > 1/4N, then selection is more important than drift. At that point you can ignore drift. So, for s = 0.01 (much smaller than your s = 0.1), then drift is unimportant at a population of 250 or more. Both of these statements come from Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology, Chapter 22. It seems that you are making drift much more important than it is. I didn't ignore it. I simply pointed out, by the math, where N drops out. And again, we are talking about differnt things. You are talking about the probability of any given mutation being fixed. 1. Yes, that will depend on an interaction between drift and selection. When the number of individuals with the variation is small, chance can eliminate the individuals -- thus lowering the overall probability of fixation. 2. What's more, as p approaches 1, the delta p per generation is going to get less and less. And many times there will be an equilibrium between the 2 alleles. This did happen in Lenski's experiment. This also lowers the probability of fixation. However, in addressing the problem Skeptic brought up, we are still facing the fact that we are not dealing with independent events. Not all 3 mutations for a trait have to appear within a single generation. If they appear sequentially, then selection is going to increase the frequency of that mutation in the population. Do you deny this? Even if we argue about probability of fixation, do you argue that the effect of selection is going to be to increase (rather rapidly) the frequency of the mutation in the population? This is going to mean that it is much more likely that the second mutation will happen in an individual that already has the first mutation. Thus the probability calculations are not going to be what Skeptic thinks they are. Do you disagree? If so, why?

Yes, drift is always present. But the probability for fixation and the time it takes for fixation dramatically change with population size. When s = 0 (genetic drift), the probability for fixation is P = 1/2N. Where N = the effective population size. So, if you have a population with N = 10, the probability is 1/20 or 0.05. Take the population to 100 and the probability of fixation drops to 1/200 or 0.005. If the population is 5000, the probability for fixation is 1/10,000. A population size of 5,000 is not that rare for large animals. There is also the time it takes for fixation. The time to fixation by genetic drift is 2N generations. Again, you can see the effect of increasing population size. If N = 10, the time to fixation is 20 generations. But if N = 1,000,000, the time to fixation = 2,000,000 generations. For bacteria this isn't going to take long since a generation is 20 minutes. But for large with a generation time of as little as 2 years, this woulod be 4 million years, which is just about the average lifespan of a species. So, as N increases, the probability that a mutation will be fixed by drift decreases dramatically while the time to fixation increases dramatically. This means that, in what we consider "small" populations (1,000 individuals), the importance of drift is negligible. The equation you gave was about the ultimate probability of a particular mutation being fixed when selection and drift interact. The one I get from Futuyma's evolutionary biology pg 93 (derived by Kimura) is: P = (1 - e^2Nsq)/(1 - e^-4Nq) where e = the base of natural logarithms = 2.718, N = effective population size, s = selection coefficient, and q = the initial frequency of the allele in the population. For a mutation, q = 1/2N This equation gives the probability of fixation, as you can see, the effective population size is in it. However, when s>0 and the population is "large", then the equation reduces to P = 2s and N disappears. We are talking apples and oranges. I am talking about the inevitability of fixation under selection and you are talking about the effect of genetic drift upon probability of fixation. Yes, when s > 0 the equation says that the frequency will increase. However, yes, you can lose the single individual initially possesing the mutation to accident. Thus, because of genetic drift, an advantageous mutation does not always become fixed in a population. But that doesn't change the deterministic equation; it adds another process. The equations are clear that, looking at selection, the inevitable effect of positive selection (s > 0) is to fix an allele (mutation) in the population. When s < 0, the inevitable effect of selection is to eliminate that allele from the population. When s = 0, the effect of genetic drift is to either fix or eliminate the new mutation. However, once the mutation is in several individuals, losing ALL the individuals becomes -- in your terms -- so improbable as to not happen. In that case, the equations are clear that fixation is inevitable. And we end up with the situation I outlined. The equation I gave is the standard equation to determine the change in frequency from generation to generation under selection. What you have done is changed the terms from a selective advantageous allele will deterministically be fixed to the probability of a particular advantageous mutation being fixed. Yes, you can lose a mutation thru genetic drift but, barring that, the equations are clear that, if s > 0, then the mutation will be fixed. And this ruins the "unrelated probability" that Skeptic is using. Remember, we were talking about selection, not drift. If s = -0.1, what you have is not going to be fixation, but elimination. If s < 0, then delta p will be negative and eventually p will = 0 and that allele will be eliminated from the population, not fixed. What you are trying to say is not that the time to fixation will be the same, but rather the time to either fixation or complete elimination (p = 0) depends on the absolute value of s. You can get fixation of slightly deleterious alleles with genetic drift. However, at your example of s = -0.1, then plug that into the equation above and see what the probabilities are. Define "purely evolutionist theory". To say it again: EVOLUTION IS NOT ATHEISM. Nor does evolution deal with "the universes [sic] creation". That is cosmology which is part of physics, not biology. No. We are talking science, and science is agnostic when it comes to "creation". The most science can say for a theist is this: "IF you believe in deity and creation for reasons outside of science, then science will tell you the material causes deity used to create. IOW, science will tell you how deity created."Come on you can play with as many chemicals for as long as you like but what about religion is it a creation of some fundamentalist viewpoint what about christianity . Natural selection is "deliberate". As we noted above, the selection part of natural selection is deterministic. What we are saying is that deity does not directly manufacture new species. IF there is a deity, then evolution by natural selection is the secondary cause by which deity creates species. You need to look up "secondary cause". It's a theological term, not a scientific one. That's the evidence of the existence of deity: the personal experiences of people. However, because those experiences are not "intersubjective" -- not everyone has them -- they are not part of science. Science is a limited form of knowing. Science can only deal with material causes. Science cannot say whether there is also a supernatural component to causes. Evolution by natural selection is sufficient as a material cause for the origin of species and the designs in plants and animals. The additional material cause of manufacture by an intelligent entity is not needed. Is deity needed for evolution to function? Science can't answer. "according to genesis" is a material cause. And no, it is not possible that the universe was created that way. This is manufacture by the "higher intelligence". You have the entity making the species elsewhere and placing it on the planet. This has been refuted by the scientific data. We can, thru genetics, detect if this happened. It did not. No. There is no need to introduce direct manufacture by a "higher intelligence". We don't need that material cause. Pantheon, it is POSSIBLE that a "higher intelligence" created the universe by the Big Bang, galaxies, stars, and planets by gravity, life by chemistry, and the diversity of life by evolution. Science can't tell you "yes" or "no" to this. What science can tell you is that the method of creation in the Bible is wrong. No. What you are forgetting is natural selection. This time in the form of purifying selection. Because crocodiles are very good at earning their living by being crocodiles and because they are well-adapted to that niche, as long as the niche remains the same, selection will keep the crocodiles the same. Almost ANY mutation is going to be deleterious to a population that is well-adapted to their environment. Therefore s < 0 and selection will eliminate that mutation and act to keep the population the same. The species can still change thru genetic drift. However, a population that is well-adapted to its environment/niche is probably going to be large in terms of genetic drift. So change by genetic drift is going to be very slow. As it happens, the species of crocodile living now are NOT the same species that lived 50 or 100 million years ago. But they are still very similar because of purifying selection: their niche has not changed much in that time. How you "predict" is look at the niche. If the environment and the niche are pretty much the same, then there will be little evolutionary change. Major evolutionary change comes when a population is able to exploit new niches or the environment changes to radically alter the niche. For instance, look at the radiation of the finches on the Galapagos or mammals after the dinos went extinct. Lots of new, unfilled niches for the species to exploit. There are studies showing that if a trait is under two or more positive selections, then that trait cannot be changed. That's how you get "bauplan".

Let's try to run thru a simple example. Say we have 3 mutations that are necessary to reach the current allele from a previous one. Again, for simplicity, let's say the probability of each mutation is 1/2. As Skeptic said "Iin statistics, the probability of multiple unrelated events occurring is the product of their individual probabilities. " So, for an individual in a single generation to have all 3 mutations is 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/8. BUT, we are NOT dealing with "unrelated events". We are dealing with cumulative selection, which means related events. If the mutations come sequentially, then the probability of an individual getting the first mutation is 1/2. Now, that mutation is selected for (confers some advantage over current alleles) and becomes fixed. So now every individual has mutation A. The probability of an individual getting mutation B is now 1/2. The probability of an individual getting both B and C is 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4. Skeptic says "Whether a mutation gets fixed or not depends both on the extent of its effect, and the population size it occurs in." This is untrue. As long as s (the selection coefficient) is at all positive, the equations are clear that the allele (mutation) will become fixed. The equation for change in frequency per generation is: delta p = (1/2)spq/(1-q). Notice that population size is not present. p and q are the frequency. I'm afraid Skeptic was referring to the probability of fixation by genetic drift. In the above equation, eventually p will equal 1. The lower the s, the longer this will take (because the larger s the larger delta p), but it will eventually happen. But B is also selected for and becomes fixed (every individual now has the allele with mutation A and B). Now the odds of an individual getting mutation C (and thus having all 3 mutations A, B, and C) is 1/2. This is how cumulative natural selection cuts down odds. The underlying premise is that all 3 mutations must appear in a single generation. Thus low probability. BUT, the data shows that this is not the case. Instead, natural selection is cumulative. This cuts down the probability. In our simplistic example the odds of getting all 3 mutations in a single individual went from 1/8 to basically 1/2. Because we can treat Behe's guess as a hypothesis and test it against the data in Lenski's experiment. Behe says it's a "simple" overexpression of citT (the citrate transport protein). That basically means a change in either the transcription factor or repressor of citT. Either an enhancement of the transcription factor or inhibition of the repressor. Either would result in increased expression of citT. Which, according to Behe, would be enough to confer aerobic cit+. Let's look at the expected consequence if that were true. The ability to utilize citrate occurred in only one strain and only after 30,000 generations. Such a simple single modification should have shown up in multiple strains since even a slight increase in citT would have conferred a survival advantage. Also, if Behe's hypothesis were correct, then at least one Lenski's multiple colonies from before the 25,000 generation stage should also have evolved cit+ as the simple mutation independently happened in those colonies. Yet they did not. So, Behe's hypothesis must be wrong. Whatever happened, it was not due to a simple change in either the transcription factor or repressor of citT. Such a change would be very probable and would not depend on previous changes. What we might have is a change in both the repressor and transcription factor. Perhaps a first change decreasing the binding strength of the repressor and then a change enhancing the binding of the transcription factor. But that is no longer "simple". But I am addressing the specific situation, not these other hypotheticals. Obviously, if the situation you describe happens, the probability drops considerably because you now have more opportunities to get multiple mutations in the same individual in the same generation. You use the probability "the probability of multiple unrelated events occurring is the product of their individual probabilities". If there is one mutation that does the job, then the individual probability is 1/n, right? But if there are 2 mutations that confer the same activity, that probability now becomes 2/n, right? And possibly 3 becomes 3/n. All of these are a decrease in probability. If unrelated, it's not included in the probability calculation. The probability equation is only based upon "required" mutations. You said "Just that more required mutations means more unlikely for all of them to happen." So, we are only talking about the probability of a "required" mutation. As I noted above, the claim is based on unrelated events. But cumulative evolution means that the events are no longer unrelated. Now, you go on to say "For multiple slightly related events, the probability of all of them happening is more complicated than just multiplying, but is still lower the more events there are." But the underlying premise here is that those multiple events have to happen at the same time. IOW, in the same individual. Again, not the situation we are facing in natural selection. Because previous mutations become fixed, we are only dealing with one event at a time. Not multiple events. Not "developing". The mutations still have the same chance of appearing. But because of what has gone before, the later mutations will have different selection coefficients. That is, different effects on survival and reproduction. And thus change whether the later mutation will be selected for or against, or how strongly each way. The previous mutations don't affect the chance of "appearing", but affect selection of the later mutations. The key is that the plasmids were made. By humans. Not made by the E. coli. So 1) it doesn't counter what I said (since the plasmid did come from another species -- humans in this case) and 2) Behe didn't teach me anything, because Behe still witheld evidence. On their own, E. coli have never made plasmids with citT in them in order to boost production of citT. But his guess doesn't match the data we already have. Behe made it appear that his guess was possible. It's not.

I didn't say "large scale events" but "large numbers". For instance, take 1,000 atoms of a radioactive isotope. In a half life, 500 of them will decay. That is regular. But when you look at each individual atom, you have no cause for that particular atom to decay. Actually, QM applies to all entities. It's just that the uncertainty gets so small as to be meaningless. For instance, you can apply the wave equations to the human body but, when you do, you get an uncertainty in position of less than the diameter of an atom. Too small to notice. Other examples of the boundary between QM and the "macro" universe are: 7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. 9. R Pool, Beams of stuff. Discover 18: 102- 107. Dec. 1997. Has shown that quantum mechanics applies to atoms (sodium atoms), they behave as waves. 8. M Brack, Metal clusters and magic numbers. Scientific American, 50-57, Dec. 1997. Experiments linking the quantum world to the macroscopic world. 11. EA Cornell and CE Weiman, The Bose-Einstein condensate. Scientific American, 278(3): 40-45, March 1998. 18. HJ Meisner, DM Stamper-Kurn, MR Andrews, DS Durfee, S Inouye, W Ketterle, Bosonic stimulation in the formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate. Science 279: 1005-1007, Feb 13, 1998. Another way to get a Bose-Einstein condensate and macroscopic matter-wave anplification. Is crucial to the concept of an atom laser. So QM is accepted as basis for next step. D Kestenbaum, Hydrogen coaxed into quantum condensate. Science 281: 321, (17 July) 1998. Bone-Einstein condensate of hydrogen. Has 10x more atoms than previous condensates. What discrepancy? In order to have free will, the future has to be open. IOW, strict determinism has to be false. QM has shown that this is the case. There are systems where you can link quantum events to the macroscopic world. Let me give you 2 examples: 1. Computer mouse. You hook up the inputs of a computer mouse to a liquid scintillation counter. A liquid scintillation counter detects the decay of a radioactive atom by linking that via chemicals such that, every time a radioactive atom decays, there is a photon emitted. The detectors are at right angles to each other. So you hook one detector to the horizontal input of the mouse and the other to the vertical. Now the movement of the cursor is going to be due to quantum events. 2. Developmental biology. Mutations in the DNA are quantum events -- either by radiation or chemical interactions. Developmental biology translates those microscopic quantum events to a macroscopic organism. So just look around you at the biological world and you will see the link between the macroscopic and microscopic. What "separation"? The basic reality is that some events are simply not "caused" in the classical sense. So what we have in the "classical" is the appearance of strict determinism, but not the reality of strict determinism. But that isn't "other worlds". It's still our world. Not under String Theory. Remember, those "extra" dimensions are "rolled up" and very small. So small that we can't perceive them. Any life form there would also be unperceived. All the stories about ghosts have beings that are large enough to do things detectable by human senses. I'm afraid they confused you. We have 2 different things here. 1. That our universe has extradimensions that are tightly 'rolled up' and undetectable. 2. The "that everything we can see in our universe is confined to a three-dimensional "membrane" that lies within a higher-dimensional realm." refers to something called "ekpyrotic theory". It's based on String Theory but is a bit different. Now, the article was written in 2000 and referred to work even earlier. Much has changed in the last 7 years. The article said "which could extend over distances as large as a millimeter ( 1/25 of an inch). Experiments are already looking for the extra dimensions' effect on the force of gravity." Unfortunately, those experiments have been done and failed to find the effects that should have been there. String Theorists have responded by making those effects smaller and smaller (thus keeping them under detection range) but the detectors have been getting more and more sensitive. Still no effects. IOW, String Theory is failing the tests. 5. Kaku M, Testing string theory. Discover August 2005 http://www.discover.com/issues/aug-05/cover/ I have not heard of String Theory passing any test yet. Only failures. If anyone has heard of ST passing tests, please let us know.

Not "faith". Data. The data says that natural selection is smarter than human ingenuity. Humans turn to natural selection to get designs when their ingenuity can't find a solution. Look up http://www.genetic-programming.com "There are properties that humans have great trouble designing into a system, like being very efficient, using small amounts of power, or being fault tolerant. Evolution can cope with them all." Evolving A Conscious Machine BY Gary Taubes Discover 19: 72-79, July 1998 When GF Joyce wanted to design a DNA enzyme, his ingenuity was completely inadequate to the task. He had no idea how to do this. So what did he do? He used natural selection! And got a DNA enzyme: 10. Breaker RR, Joyce GF.A DNA enzyme that cleaves RNA. Chem Biol 1994 Dec;1(4):223-9 I don't see any genetic changes that our society demands. In fact, the whole point of the opening post is that our technology is working so that genetic changes are not needed. So what genetic changes do you think our society is demanding in H. sapiens? I fail to see why changes in technology or social structure require genetic changes. As I said, since humans call upon natural selection when their ingenuity is insufficient, I fail to see why you think human ingenuity should substitute for natural selection in picking the alleles in the human population. No. Humans could decide to eliminate particular alleles from the population -- such as the alleles for Lou Gehrig's disease or achondroplasia. NS would have no say. Humans could also decide that everyone must have a particular allele. In that case NS is also not the decider because there are no longer different alleles to choose from. Only 1 allele in the population. That's the problem -- whether those alleles (not "genes", if you are going to advocate this, you should at least know the correct terms) are really "superior". As I keep telling you, "superior" only applies to the particular environment. There is no such thing as a universally "superior" allele. But your argument is based upon the mistaken premise that this is so. What you now have is a decrease in diversity: only 1 allele where before there were several. What happens if the technology or society changes? The new environment would favor one of the alleles that you have now lost because you, in your hubris, decided you were smarter than natural selection and decided you needed to genetically modify humans when that was unnecessary. So, in the new environment, the alleles necessary for survival are not present. That's how species go extinct, you know: the environment changes and the population does not have the necessary diversity on hand. Or maybe you don't know. Just as you didn't know that humans use natural selection when their ingenuity isn't good enough. The changes you have described so far have been to increase genetic diversity. People who could not pass on their alleles due to infertility now can. Thus the alleles that would have been lost stay in the population. From an evolutionary standpoint, that is good. But the next stage you advocate is a massive decrease in diversity. You are advocating picking particular alleles, then manipulating genomes such that everyone has those alleles. That means that all other alleles are gone from the population. The data from evolutionar biology is clear: the species that do best are the generalists with the most genetic diversity. As species become more and more adapted to a particular niche and lose diversity due to purifying selection, the more vulnerable they become to extinction. If the particular niche changes, the species doesn't have the genetic reserve of possible designs to meet the new environment. Your example points to the problem we are trying to get you to see: genetic manipulation got you into the problem of sensitivity to changes in the environment. The natural banana is not in danger of being exterminated by these diseases, is it? The problem is the result of the genetic manipulation you want to inflict on humans! Then you expect GM to get you out of the problem GM created in the first place! " So this example actually points out the importance and the future with GM as a major tool. Natural selection is simply not applicable to cultivated bananas. The natural ones are inedible, and the cultivated ones are clones, lacking the genetic variation that NS works on. Thus, only GM can solve the problems of new diseases. You forget that humans did not have to decide to eat bananas to begin with! Nor were we required to use GM on bananas. So, if we don't use GM on humans, we won't have the lack of genetic diversity that we inflicted on the banana! 1. Natural selection doesn't take that long. It can operate much, much faster than that. 2. NS can do rapid adaptation if there is genetic diversity in the population. But what you are advocating is reducing genetic diversity. 3. So far, our "rapidly changing environment" has been met with changes in technology. What changes do you foresee that would require genetic changes in humans that could not be met by technology? 4. Rapid changes due to NS results from most of the population dying before reproduction. Only the few individuals with the necessary designs survive. So yes, H. sapiens could rapidly adapt. We would lose our civilization, but the species would adapt. Skeptic, I think you need to realize that you are combining 2 different things: keeping a large population and, thus, civilization, and adaptation. You are working with the premise that both must be present. No. H. sapiens can (and has in the past) adapted rapidly but does so without the modern technological civilization. Actually, you have this backwards. If we rely on your vision of picking alleles and reducing diversity, then we become extinct. With NS the human species would survive even if technological civilizaition did not. Under your scheme, if we ever lose the technological civilization (the particular environment you have picked alleles for), we also lose the species.

Yes. Archaea and Bacteria are 2 Domains. That's not so much a problem. Remember, there is no precise definition of species for any group because one species transforms to another. IOW, because evolution is true any definition of species (ability to interbreed, morphology, etc.) is always going to have populations that are "in-between". The morphological species definition is no more arbitrary than genetic. As long as you have lineal descent of genes from ancestor to descendent, then tracing a phylogenetic tree is possible. But when genes are introduced from other distinct lineages thru lateral gene transfer, then you can't trace ancestor-descendent. Because the new gene is not a modification from the ancestor; it appears within a single generation as it is transferred from a completely different evolutionary lineage. Poof! the gene is just there! And has no relationship to any of the existing genes within the organism. So, as phylogenetic analysis gets back closer to the last common ancestor of all life, the analyses tend to break down and show many possible candidates for the LCA. Right, but that is because your clonal strain doesn't have any contact with any other unicellular organism to get plasmids from. If the culture dish gets contaminated with another microoganism, you throw it out!

Right. Lots of modifications in that "descent" from the original bacteria. And, of course, modifications in the eukaryotic cell. Due to lateral gene transfer. Bacteria get genes not only from inheritance but via plasmids from quite unrelated unicellular organisms. Even across Kingdom lines: Archea to bacteria, for instance.

No. Most loci (locations of genes) most of the time are neutral in terms of selection. They are at what is called Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and the frequency does not change from generation to generation. That is not "evolution" but rather natural selection. However, the sequence is variation, selection, reproduction. Not exclusively. 99% of all species are still unicellular. A more accurate statement would be "there are ecological niches (ways of earning a living) for which being multicellular is better than being unicellular." No, we're not. Every contemporary species has the same 3.8 billion year history of evolution. They are all descendents of evolutionary winners, just as we are. We have more technology, but that does not make us superior in an evolutionary sense. In which case we were not "superior" in an evolutionary sense, much less "the pinnacle of evolution", were we? YES! Let natural selection work. It's smarter than we are. Glad you do. Possibly. Unfortunately, many things, including disease, are polygenic. There are some genetic diseases (such as achrondroplasia or osteogenesis imperfecta) where you might be able to manipulate the genome of ovum and sperm to eliminate the disease. OTOH, you might also be able to cure the disease by just using manipulated some adult stem cells instead of messing with the reproductive cells.

Why would it be a pointer to other worlds? Quantum physics, philosophically, gives us the best of both worlds. Since quantum events are regular in large numbers, they give a rational universe that appears deterministic on a large scale. However, because individual quantum events are uncaused, it means that we do not live in a strictly deterministic universe and that means that the future is open. Not predetermined by all the cause and effect chain that has gone before. So our actions and thoughts are genuinely our own and not the result of all that has gone before. We are not puppets but genuinely agents with free will. It was data that led to the hypotheses of duality and what happens at the quantum level. What data do you have that suggests "other worlds"?

I've dealt with this before. Traits are only "good" or "bad" in relation to particular environments. Our technology is part of our environment; it is "nature". What we do with our technology and "defects" is to keep genetic diversity in the population. My favorite example is Stephen Hawking. Lou Gehrig's disease and, without technology, would have died in his early teens. With technology, he had kids. So, let's balance the possible cost of having the Lou Gehrig "defective" alleles in the population vs having Hawking's alleles for intelligence. Can you decide which is better? No. But natural selection can. Relax. Natural selection is much smarter than we are. Just let it do it's job. IF we ever lose our civilization and technology, then natural selection will adapt the population to those new (old) conditions. In the meantime, while technology keeps what you consider "defects", it also keeps new possibly beneficial traits so that they can show their worth in this new environment that includes our technology. Sorry, that's wrong. Natural selection is most effective in smaller populations. For genetic drift to be a major player, the effective breeding size of the population must be less than 50 individuals. That doesn't happen often. See Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology for the calculations. The larger a population, the more generations it takes for an allele to become fixed by natural selection. That's why Gould and Eldredge proposed that most phenotypic evolutionary change happened in small, isolated populations during speciation (Punctuated Equilibrium). Large populations are resistant to change. Partly due to the size and partly because, in order to get large, the population had to be well-adapted to the environment. This means that they are now subject to purifying selection -- which resists change. You guys tend to think about evolution as changing the entire human population. But that isn't how evolution usually works. The large population stays the same. Change comes in small, isolated populations. So, if you want changes in humans, look to isolated populations like the !Kung, the Andean or Himalayan highlanders, or populations living on small islands in the Pacific. That's where the next species of Homo will arise. That's how it happened in human evolution. We didn't have one large population that evolved from A. afrarensis to H. habilis to H. ergastor to H. sapiens. Instead, we had an isolated population in Africa that did this. When Homo ergastor migrated out of Africa we got a plethora of new species: H. antecessori in Spain, neandertals in Europe, Pekenensis in China, erectus in SE Asia, and floriensis on one particular island. All were eventually replaced by sapiens migrating from Africa. Sapiens would have split into many new species except that our technology includes transportation and subsequent gene flow between populations. It's important in providing the raw material for future adaptation. It means that there are more possible designs present in the population to meet unforseen future needs. Mooeypoo is looking at designs that were effective 50,000 years ago. That population didn't include alleles to be resistant to HIV: the current population does. Nor did that population need alleles to various toxins now present in the environment: such as dioxins. Because humans used fires in confined spaces that produced smoke, we had pretty good antioxidant systems. That became useful when humans invented smoking tobacco -- particularly cigarettes. If we eliminate known "defects" now, we may lose the alleles the population may need in the future.

You forget selection. Natural selection is a two step process: 1. Variation. Mutations are one source of variation 2. Selection The environment picks which mutations work in that environment. The variation is random with respect to the needs of the individual or population, but the selection is deterministic. They were not randomly better at survival, the variation was deterministically better at survival. IOW, it was a better design than the other variations. Creationists have a differing view because it kills the idea that the designs in plants and animals are the result of direct manufacture by deity. It does not kill the "God concept". Instead, natural selection becomes the secondary cause used by God to get design.