Posted by Walker on April 27, 1998 at 13:18:49:
In Reply to: History and evolutionary experiments. Still two different things. posted by rpcman on April 26, 1998 at 17:45:28:
: : I disagree. If a theory is to be proved by experimentation, the experiment must make some prediction. In a sense, the future must be foretold.
: Here is an experiment for you. Take a nice sized random sample of a species of your choice. Find a trait in a minority of the species (1% to be exact) that gives those individuals a 5% advantage in survival/reproduction. I predict (with a great deal of confidence) that in 100 generations 56% of the population will exhibit this trait. Go ahead, try it. Let me know how it goes.
: If this doesn't equal 'evolution' into separate species in your book then do the experiment twice in two different settings evolving them for different fitness. You may have to wait a few hundred of your lifetimes but you'll get the results.
This is the kind of thing I am looking for, except this experiement would only demonstrate selection on an e existing trait, not evolution as I understand it. Correct me if I'm wrong but the peppered moth, of whatever color is still a peppered moth (the same species).
I propose something different: Pick some species with a known gene set. If we choose some bacteria then we have the benefit of rapid reproduction plus asexual reproduction enures the same gene set for the entire group (This way we can catalog the gene set of just one cell rather than every cell in the sample and mutations will be easier to track) Now just take that one cell and have it reproduce several times.
Note: I am not a biologist so maybe using a single set of genes would somehow invalidate the experiment, you tell me.
We should control it's environment as much as possible, temperature, food source, radiation, etc. Now let's add a stress factor such as an anti-biotic. Watch the bacteria for many generations until it mutates a gene(s) that give it resisistance. Repeat this experiment several times to see how often the same set of mutant genes crop up. (That way we know our mutation isn't just a one time aberation)
Surely, someone has tried an experiement like this. Please let me know if you have come across something like this in your reading (not just selection of an existing trait) I certainly would want to read about the experience of others before I set out to do this in my kitchen on my own time.
: Asking for a recreation of history (in evolving humans from other primates) is a silly experiment to propose. It is far more impossible to recreate such a timely experiment (6 million years+) which had so many variables the first go around. Recreating the civil war with the same, now dead, people would be easier. We don't need to do so for the theory to still be valid.
Yes, that experiment is impracticle, but surely there must be something better than, "After many generation a new species of flower popped up which had double the chromosomes of its parent population" (An example I once read about) Can't we set up the conditions for such a mutation again and watch it happen over and over?
: : Evolution is called a theory, not a law and that is an important distinction. When the day comes when evolutionary theory is complete perhaps we will have solutions to problems like the mutating, anti-biotic resistant bacteria. Perhaps we will no longer hear, "We can put a man on the moon but we can’t cure the common cold"
: Does your doctor predict you will not get the flu when he gives you a vaccine for it? If not, then you are wasting your money. Predictions are made all the time with bugs and pesticides *before the fact* and the results are very accurate.
Document a prediction that was made about vaccines or pesticides in terms of how the target organism would evolve (not shift existing traits) to defeat said vaccine or pesticide. I grant you, gene shift happens, natural selection of traits happens. These aren't evolution. Evolution means a new (successful) gene pops up.
: It is as evolution has been observed countless times. Also, the people who make this claim think that scientific theory is a mere untested, unobserved hypothesis. We both know that a scientific theory is far more than this.
Yes, a theory is more than an untested, or unobserved hypothesis. I'm not certain evolution has been tested sufficiently to be considered fact.
--Alan
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