In a new post at UD, Denyse O’Leary quotes an article from The Scientist (which she misattributes to Science):
Populations of Escherichia coli grown in the lab quickly evolve tolerance when exposed to repeated treatments with the antibiotic ampicillin, according to a study published today (June 25) in Nature. Specifically, the bacteria evolved to stay in a dormant “lag” phase for just longer than three-, five-, or eight-hour-long treatment courses, before waking up and growing overnight until the next round of treatment began.
Denyse comments:
They don’t think, but something seems to be doing their thinking for them. Not natural selection acting on random mutation because they evidently choose to avoid it whenever possible. That is, they avoid direct conflict with antibiotics, whether natural or human-directed.
It’s fascinating. A simple non-teleological explanation is staring her in the face, but she manages to look right through it and latch onto a baroque and bizarre teleological explanation instead. Such is the tight grip of the teleological mindset.
Denyse, what is the “something” that is “thinking” these bacteria into antibiotic tolerance, and how does that work, exactly?
Yep.
I’m pretty sure phoodoo is not anywhere near as dumb as xe sometimes plays at being. The Mt Everest metaphor is an obvious callout to Climbing Mt Improbable and I think it’s very very clever of phoodoo to have worked in that reference while still concealing xis familiarity with Dawkins 😛
Too bad xe hasn’t been clever enough for xis familiarity to blossom into actual understanding.
hotshoe,
I still doubt that. If he had any familiarity with the literature, he would know every way in which his happy meteorite-analogy fails (to be an analogy). Or perhaps he does know, but just can’t admit it to himself.
hotshoe,
Here are a couple problems with the meteorite theory:
1. Meteorites are very rare.
2. No meteorite has ever been known to strike a person without killing them.
3. No object of any kind has ever propelled anybody up any mountain by striking this person in the back.
4. Wheelchair-bound people are not effectively moved by whacking them in the back.
5. Etc.
It is, in fact almost as absurd a proposal as that mutations are somehow ‘guided’ from outside.
But now consider that each element of unguided evolution is not only plausible but has tons of empirical support for its existence. Mutations occur regularly, they do occasionally effect beneficial changes which are retained due to natural selection. There is nothing intrinsically different about these timing changes in bacteria that suggest the same sort of mechanisms could not be responsible as are responsible for numerous other behaviors. Etc.
In a word, this metaphor of the happy meteorite is instructive precisely because it works so badly for design suckers. While people will likely be happy to admit the intentions that were involved in the Everest ascent, the intentions claimed to be invloved in evolutionary changes are purely theoretical, and have no empirical support whatever. No Dumbledore or Ptah or Hay Zeus has stepped forward to take responsibility. Fortunately, however, it’s pretty clear even at our current stage of scientific development, that none is likely ever to be needed.
walto,
Perhaps you could rework his happy meteorite analogy to more closely fit RV & NS?
Not quite true. And she wasn’t even seriously hurt!
I stand corrected.
I’m gueesing she wasn’t pushed up a mountain though.
Oh, I definitely agree that wheelchari-Everest is a craptastic metaphor for actual evolution. I just wanted to give “clever phoodoo” credit for coming up with Everest to reflect on the extended metaphor in Dawkins Mt Improbable – even if Dawkins is orders of magnitude better. Maybe giving phoodoo too much credit for seeing the similarity ?
Speaking of Everest, I was suddenly reminded that the youngest person ever to summit is Joseph Romero, who climbed it when he was age 13; 3 years ago.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02854/jordanromero2_2854124b.jpg
I bet Romero would have something interesting to say to us about wheelchairs and meteorites on his mountain 🙂
I can’t find a link now, but at the time he was writing and giving inspirational talks to other middle-and-high-school kids, and he sounded intelligent. Not a waster like me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)
Fossil-bearing marine limestone form the summit of Mount Everest, pushed up by various natural forces from the floor of the Tethys Ocean.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=4567432
Some of the natural force includes the energy of Earth’s formation from meteor impacts. What are the odds!?
petrushka,
So I’ve already been informed (see above). I wrote my post on the MBTA on my way home from work (early to catch the second half of the U.S. Belgium match) on my (crappy) Blackberry. I had an inkling that my (2) might not be true, but I plunged ahead boldly anyhow, like an angry Shiva.
If you take a look at the post, it doesn’t matter too much. I don’t need there never to have been a person who’s been struck by a meteor and lived to tell the tale. The point is that it’s a wildly unusual occurrence at best, while random variation has produced beneficial mutations on lots of occasions. Of course, the design suckers insist that that can’t happen anyhow. Facts are not a big deal for them. To show that it is at least slightly bigger for me, I’m happy to rewrite my (2) as
2*. If a meteorite strikes a human being, we can expect it will kill him or her. At any rate, it’s much more likely to do that than to give this person a helpful nudge up a big mountain.
In any case, Gral asked me to re-do the meteorite analogy so that it more closely mirrors what happens with random variation and natural selection. Hmmmm–Let’s see.
We could liken the particular placements of meteor impacts in North America with random variation. After all, they might land anywhere.
But now suppose that the craters they leave are generally filled in over time, except where the following are the case:
(A) They land in a suburban area; and
(B) They land someplace where it’s really hot three seasons of the year.
When both (A) and (B) are the case, rather than fill the craters in, people preserve them, fill them with water and turn them into community swimming holes,
Now, say some incurious phoodoo type is unaware of this whole history but does notice that there are several dozen swimming holes strewn across the Southeast and Southwest, all of which produce considerable pleasure/relief for the people of those communities. In addition, this person is told that the pools were a result of meteor impacts.
“See how wondrous God is, and how glorious His works are to behold,” this design sucker infers, and continues thusly: “In His wisdom, He has placed swimming holes precisely where they are needed! How could there come to be a beautiful place to swim right outside Santa Fe, if no God were to have planned this specifically for the pleasure of New Mexicans! Hail Zeus! Hail Hay Zeus! (Yay America!)”
Is that the kind of thing you were looking for, Gral?
Hey, it works for me!
walto,
Nice one! We’ll call it Swimming Lake Impossible, or something like that.
My PhD topic was chemical clocks, as it happens – daylength measurement in Xanthium strumarium. Many organisms need to measure time periods, for example plants detect daylength thresholds to trigger flowering or leaf drop. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but hey ho. Some housemates were doing experiments with photoperiodic control of breeding time in quail. Don’t know what they found, but we had a very tasty casserole.
Surely any Designer worth his salt would be able to devise a chemical clock? phoodoo cannot suppose that everything else about the bacterium is exquisitely designed, but the Designer has to stand by with a stopwatch? These organisms he’s come up with are supposed to be low maintenance. I’m betting the clock has a molecular, genetic basis.
We can await phoodoo’s challenge to provide a step by step schema for how this evolved, in the absence of which “therefore it was designed” is all the detail required for a counter-explanation.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here?
If it’s not something in the organism doing the timing, it must therefore be something external doing the timing.
Is it?
OMagain,
The question is, is it something in the organism that could develop by accidental mutations, and be selected for.
The odds are about the same as the guy in the wheelchair on Everest.
No, and I’m betting you understand quite well why not. It’s even laid out above.
Meteorites don’t hit very often. In fact, the chances of being hit by one are so small they’re practically non-existent. Mutations, on the other hand, happen all the time. Each newborn human child has a genomic offset of some 100 bp relative to the genomes of its parents, as I understand (and that’s without factoring in crossover and so on). And that offset is mostly random. The figures in other organisms will be similar.
The guy in the wheel chair doesn’t select. Life does. Changes that offer a slight improvement are kept and promoted, while neutral or detrimental changes fade from the population.
That’s just two reasons your ‘analogy’ is bunk. A strawman. You’ll have to think of something better, if you’re hoping to convince yourself.
Just trot out the same crap over and over, phoodoo, ignoring all problems, plain facts, fallacies, inconsistencies, and errors, no matter how often they’re pointed out.
But it’s ok–it’s just like church!
So you’ve worked out the odds? Show us.
Perhaps phoodoo is a bit like that kid in high school who doesn’t understand that the teacher doesn’t just want him to provide the result, but that it’s at least as important the kid be able to show how he got there.
You are looking at it the wrong way.
Think of it as a Monte Carlo method.
Yes, that’s the question.
Even the more scientificlaly minded IDers have trouble with numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Behe#Dover_testimony
As you’ve not shown your working, I’ll put you in the same bucket as Behe for now then.
Has Monte Carlo come up on a thread recently? Not something I’ve noticed before …
So, the wiki page’s section on Computational Biology leaves a lot to be desired, but the section Artificial intelligence for games looks good:
I’m not sure I understand this, but I picture that the bacteria (or any lifeform; let’s focus on the E coli we’ve been discussing in this thread) are “playing” a non-simulated game, that is, mutating for real (at random, we think) rather than selecting a node for game (at random, as we know,) and then using the results of that non-simulated game to “update the node” by showing its surviving progeny.
Of course, what’s frustrating to anti-evolutionists is the uncertainty and error of this kind of search game — there’s literally no way to predict in advance which binary choice will be successful except by playing it out (simulation or reality) many many times. And then we can calculate which of the two original choices lead to the best odds of the eventual wins.
Mutate, play it out, try a different mutation in the original cell line, play it out, repeat, repeat, repeat. Sloppy. No guarantees.
phoodoo,
Yes, your stock response entirely as predicted. Please show your working.
As with epigenetics, I’d ask what is it about molecular timekeeping that places it beyond the reach of a mutational process? If it’s genetic, it can be modified. If it’s poor initially, it can be improved by natural selection – by conferring a benefit over brethren with worse, or nonexistent, clocks.
The capacity of blind mutation and selection to achieve timekeeping is represented in this simulation. Yes, it’s a GA, and you have loads of trouble believing that such things are not riddled with teleology. The fitness function is, indeed, evaluation of ‘clockiness’, essentially programmed in. But one only needs to understand that individuals with a poor clock may nonetheless outcompete those with none to understand the relevance for the evolution of a ‘real’ timer, with no programmer required.
phoodoo:
rumraket:
Ditto. Let’s see you back up your claim, phoodoo.
This is going to end in Shapiro, isn’t it? Or is it just going to peter out?
Looks like no numbers will be forthcoming.
Lets hope the Netherlands don’t peter out this time!
Yes, that was a frustrating game.
Your calculations, phoodoo?
Or a Gal?
http://blog.amsvans.com/woman-with-ms-makes-mt-everest-trek-with-a-dream-team/