Challenging someone over whether a Bacteria population will ever be something else is really an argument for atheists.
Supporters of BioLogos support the idea that GOD has guided evolution. So how you can you prove anything by asking a Christian if something will evolve into something else if God doesn’t want it to?
Again, Joe, I charge you with being intentionally provocative - - not someone doing detective work.
Christians who support the use of natural selection and mutations to create a new life form are not choosing an ILLOGICAL stance. It is perfectly logical. You can’t challenge God’s ability to accomplish this end, right?
So why do you keep beating the drum and beating your head against the wall?
The challenge is not an argument for atheists or theists - it is a normative outlook in all of the sciences, when a hypothesis is proposed. Thus, IF a hypothesis makes a statement, such as (purely to clarify) that if A occurs in a given manner, then a prediction is that B would result, science would require B to be formed.
With experiments such as bacteria, the prediction is that a change would be detected given sufficient number of iterations (generations, I assume, of bacteria). If the predicted change is nebulous, then debate is inevitable. In this case, one person says given enough changes in “generations of bacteria”, they will evolve some given trait. The other says, your theory states a change in species, so perform sufficient changes until we observe a new species.
Within the context (and semantics) of evolution, both statements are scientifically valid, but the second has not been demonstrated.
This is not provocation; however I find your incessant “GOD has done this or that…” irritating.
Now THAT is ironic, don’t you think? You are IRRITATED by claims that God had something to do with the creation of humanity!!!
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Let the record show that I have offered no money or other inducements to @GJDS to self-incrimination of the motivations of those who oppose Biologos.
For Christians who RELY on this idea, it should not be surprising if some crucial step in speciation cannot be replicated by science… since the position of such Christians (and BioLogos) .is that God’s participation could easily overcome any particular barrier to natural speciation.
You should calm down - my point is obvious, in that you make odd statements directed at scientific matters, and then add “God must have dun it …” This does not support anyone, least of all BioLogos - and it is obnoxious to infer that if someone does not agree with you, we must be against BioLogos (or perhaps against people who work there). Just who has made you judge and jury on this site (and self-incrimination??? - irritated by claims that God had something to do with anything - where did that come from?)
There is no argument concerning God as Creator George - this is not the cause of irritation from you - instead, it is a strange version of “god of the gaps” mentality that I find irritating.
So if something in nature looks like what humans do, it’s evidence for design, and if it looks like something humans can’t do, it’s evidence for design? [quote=“dcscccc, post:615, topic:4944”]
but the flagellum and a lot of other molecular machines are indeed look like a man made machines:
[/quote]
Humans do not make machines out of proteins, and do not design self-assembling machines.
Overall, the argument that living things look like they’re designed strikes me as completely backwards. For example, it’s claimed that genomes look and act like computer code, and therefore must be designed. The reality, however, is that genomes look like computer programs that weren’t designed, but that were written and rewritten over time by semi-competent programmers. Genomes have blocks of nonfunctioning code, blocks that are obvious cases of cut-and-paste with later modification, identical functions performed by unrelated modules. This is the sort of thing you see if you haven’t started by designing your program from the ground up, or if you’ve had to change it in unexpected ways without having enough time to re-engineer it.
Given the fact that you define the theory of evolution so differently than the scientific community does, you will understand that I have to wonder about those 3 decades.
And here I have to question how carefully you read Lenski’s paper–unless you are relying on third parties. Lenski’s team discovered that the citT gene was copied (via an amplification mutation) into the region of a promoter active in the presence of oxygen. Your desciption of this discovery does not sound like their description of the discovery. Your description does seem to echo the description by the Institute for Creation Research site, however.
Analysis of the published base sequence residing in the pOAD2 plasmid of Flavobacterium Sp. K172 indicated that the 392-amino acid-residue-long bacterial enzyme 6-aminohexanoic acid linear oligomer hydrolase involved in degradation of nylon oligomers is specified by an alternative open reading frame of the preexisted coding sequence that originally specified a 472-residue-long arginine-rich protein.
I have followed the footnotes in the Purdom/AiG article, and discovered that they make the unwarranted conclusion that the frameshift mutation led to a less specific esterolytic activity. Ohno’s team, however, did not describe a less specific esterolytic activity, but rather the ability to break down a different ester (nylon-6).
Given what I discovered in my research, Joe, I am led to conclude that you got your information on Arthrobacter sp. K172 from the AiG website.
Spetner is a Jewish physicist who believes that all of life stems from 365 different species that God created during the literal 6 days of Genesis 1. You expect me to take a citation to Spetner as evidence of your recent reading outside of YEC/ID authorship?
After all this research, Joe, I have found no hint of a citation to mainstream biology in the passage you cited as proof to the contrary. I suppose I might have missed something, but you’re going to have to supply specific evidence if you want me to believe otherwise.
Of course, I cannot and do not dispute that you have read, at some point, evolutionary biologists. What I am asserting, based on the evidence you cite, is that you have not been reading both sides of the debate on issues that have been discussed in this thread, such as Arthrobacter sp. K172, Lenski’s LTEE with E. Coli, and the evolution of the flagellum.
And with that I bid you adieu, my brother. Enjoy the weekend with your family, and may you find success with your business.
I think you are going to have to explain YOUR interpretation a lot more than what you offer.
What do I hear from Creationists?
Creationists say God created the Earth in a day.
Creationists say God created a woman from a rib.
Creationists say God gave Samson magical hair.
And all of this you accept as … well … literally… as GOSPEL! And any YEC who comes around with this statements are welcome with open arms?
Let’s compare these amazing pronouncements to what I claim:
A) I say God made pinpoint mutations in Genetic chromosomes … (mutations are already known to happen).
B) I say God used cosmic rays (and lots of other kinds of energy sources) to make these mutations (energy sources are already known to cause mutations).
C) I say God took MILLIONS of years to do these things.
And you say I’m the one making radical statements, full of presumption, and that you can barely stand it?
You’ve GOT to be kidding?!
I suppose I can understand why you confuse my position with a God-of-the-Gaps.
But it really isn’t that. At the beginning, I state that God can execute his plan 100% by natural law … or he could perform the occasional miracle. But this is no sliding scale of credibility. It’s no more unfathomable than what YEC’s proclaim every day. Does God use natural laws to make Eve from a piece of bone? Or is suspending natural law to do so?
Do YOU know the answer to that, @GJDS? Don’t worry … this isn’t a test. Because we all know YOU don’t know. And I don’t know. But at least I acknowledge that I don’t know!
What irritates me is when Creationists INSIST they know what God did … when, really, they don’t have any idea.
God of the gaps by definition is any belief that God can be found in the natural order. In other words if you believe there is anything about the world itself that cannot be explained in scientific terms then you believe in a god of the gaps. I don’t believe it is possible to find (scientific) evidence of God outside of the life of Jesus. There are no holes in creation where God had to stick his finger in to keep the whole thing afloat. The physical world is not the ultimate nature of reality however. God is the ultimate nature of reality. Nothing exists save what God Wills to exist. We will never find God in the natural order because the world is a buffer between us and God. There is no possibility of stairways to heaven. God is not outside of the world either. The world is inside of God. Everything you experience is directly from God. Including your perception of the complex and complete world that he has created for you to experience.
Let’s take a look at the “experiment” that occurred starting around 1.3bya, at the emergence of eukaryotic bacteria. The volume of water in the biosphere is 1.2 x 10^21 L, which is conveniently 10^20 larger than the amount of water in Lenski’s design (12 flasks x 1 L/each). Let’s assume that the bacteria population per L in the ancient biosphere was not as dense as Lenski’s population due to competition from non-eukaryotic organisms, darkness at depth, etc., by a factor of 10^4. The emergence of multicellular life is thought to have occurred 500 million years later (800mya). So if we replicate Leski’s experiment by a factor of 10^16 (10^20 difference in water volume divided by 10^4 difference in bacteria density), we would predict that non-bacteria might emerge in 500 million years. Since it’s not easy to duplicate Lenski’s operation, much less multiply it by a factor of 10^16, it’s easier to just multiply the 500 million years by the replication factor of 10^16.
So I am willing to bet that, if you ran Lenski’s experiment for 5 x 10^24 years (500 million times 10^16), you would see non-bacteria.
That’s 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
The universe is only 13,800,000,000 (1.38 x 10^9) years old, by comparison.
PM - I think this is a very poor description. Most of the most important things in the world cannot be explained in scientific terms - mind, morality, beauty, teleology, intentionality (“aboutness”), the existence of order, the experience of providence, etc, etc. Were that not so, science would be able to give a full description of reality, which is the scientistic position. It implies that the universe is an entirely closed material system, for which there is no evidence (it’s an assumption) and which is universally denied in Scripture, which describes God as immanent and soverignly free to act in his own world…
As an intellectually cogent critique, “God of the Gaps” is merely a slogan unless the accused has a habit of denying that all processes or events not currently explained by science have a direct miraculous cause, sans efficient material causes… without offering sufficient evidence for it, because in principle nothing prevents that being true, at least in any particular case.
But there are many other ways in which God’s work is found in the natural order, apart from the miraculous.
Though I sympathize with your calculation, I do not think this thought experiment would necessarily work. Lenski’s experiment very uniform conditions and favors rapidly dividing cells over all else. This is a common bias of lab based systems.
The problem is, to generate complexity other concerns over rapid division are probably important. The environment has to be more complicated, with unfilled niches to reward adaptation and innovation. That is one big way how “information” enters into evolution (speaking very loosely here), from the environment.
So, you are right, that the Lenski experiment does not have enough probabilistic resources to do anything really interesting. Unfortunately, it has additional problems too.
Yes, the back-of-the-envelope calculation underestimates the advantage of real-world environmental variety (over Lenski’s experimental design). Thus I have underestimated the amount of time it would take Lenski’s experiment to replicate the real world result.
Even if my calculations are off by many orders of magnitude, though, we see that a wager on non-bacteria emerging is still completely meaningless.
Hi Joshua, Hope your long weekend was reatorative. Reflecting further on our conversation, I wondered what would be the best conversion factor for comparing Lenski’s design with the “natural” experiment that started 1.3bya. I assumed that Lenski’s design would have an advantage of 4 magnitudes due to a (presumed) higher density of eukaryotic bacteria. You mentioned 2 other factors to consider:
Faster reproduction in the lab environment.
Greater variety of niches to exploit in nature.
These two factors would appear to counteract one another. However, one might be stronger than the other, resulting in a net effect in one direction or the other.
So what conversion factor would you suggest to (roughly) calibrate the Lenski to nature comparison? Is 10^4:1 a plausible ratio?
I think you misunderstood my point #1. It is not an advantage that there is faster reproduction in the lab environment. It is exactly the opposite.
Lab environments in general (and Lenski’s experiment in particular) are optimized to select very strongly for reproduction efficiency. This is why, for example, gene duplications and neutral plasmids are usually quickly lost in most bacterial lab experiments. There is no advantage to keeping hold of genes to metabolize (for example) fructose, or forming spores, if you are being fed glucose all the time. In fact, keeping those genes around just slows down your reproduction, which in this experiment because primarily limited by DNA replication. So the selective forces are very strongly against greater complexity. Lean, mean replicating machines win in this experiment. The selection works against, for example, adaptability and complexity.
So, from one point of view, because of this, I do not think there is a good “factor” to use. I think that Lenski’s experimental design could very well make it impossible for greater complexity (e.g. multicellular life) to arise. It is not clear at all that multicellular life would have the advantage in this system. Nor is it clear that intermediate steps would be selected for.
The taunt that Lenski’s experiment somehow “fails” to produce complexity, from my point of view, really betrays fundamental ignorance of how evolution works. Of course, your probabilistic argument points out one problem. But I still think there is more. If it is to work, evolution requires a large number of varied niches for organisms to fill. Each niche selects for different things, and this is a key driver for diversity and the substrate from which more interesting complexity might arise down the line. In addition to mutations of genome, environment plays a very important role too.
Lenski’s experiment is not just quantitatively different than biological evolution (as you have explored). It is also qualitatively different. Therefore, I am not convinced that even an infinite amount of time would be enough.
I spent a lot of time with chemostats and continuous cultures during my post-doc work.
In Lenksi’s experiment there is cyclical feast/famine. ‘Feast’ when cells are subcultured into fresh media and ‘famine’ when the nutrients are exhausted. This leaves many paths of optimization for reproduction. For example, bacteria can optimize doubling with fresh media. They can also improve scavaging limited resources. Additionally, the ability to come out of stationary phase faster could provide benefits. There are any number of specific changes that could undergo selections over the course of the experiment and it’s clear that the populations never stay still and are always in a state of flux. The citrate utilization mutants Lenski et al isolated were able to exploit the citrate in the buffer as a carbon source, thus allowing the cells to reach higher cell densities than other strains unable to metabolize the compound.
Some pedantic notes:
I agree that lab strains can lose genes over time but it’s not typically all that quick. Often I had to use ‘active’ methods that increased selective pressure on plasmids to cure plasmids from strains. Gene duplications seem to disappear most often not because the additional DNA is a burden on the cell, which covers typically a tiny portion of the energy budget or replication speed, but because duplications are inherently unstable. Duplicated chromosomal sections are subject to recombination excision. One paper I’ve seen describes loss rates as high as 0.01-0.15 per cell per generation (Nature Reviews Microbiology 7, 578-588 (August 2009)).
You are clearly very informed on the Lenski experiment. Thanks for filling in many of the details for the rest of us (including me).
It should be clear, nonetheless, that my point still stands. There are much fewer, and less varied, niches in the Lenski experiment than on planet earth. In the experiment there is still a single (even if it is dynamic) macro environment with only a few microenvironment. I’m just not convinced that anything truly complex (yes, subjective definition) could arise here.
Of course, @Argon, this is all theoretical. I’m not gonna die on this hill. You seem to be informed. Maybe you are right.
