Instant Evolution

Washington State University ^ | 2003 | Mary Aegerter

[NJ_gent]

"Any guesses how complex life REALLY is and how many eons you have to throw at it to get even the simplest DNA strand to "evolve.""

I'd say about 20 minutes, actually. Get together a petri dish loaded with bacteria, then toss in some sort of toxin. Heck, throw in some anti-bacterial Lysol. With 99% of the bacteria dead, natural selection leaves only those fit for the new environment, which now includes Lysol. Now, close to 100% of the next generation of bacteria are immune to the toxin. Why did the 1% survive the initial introduction of the toxin? Slight genetic variations caused by random mutations allowed for a small portion to have a pre-existing immunity, which is then quite likely to be passed on to the next generation. Hence, your petri dish population looks radically different over the course of mere minutes.

The nice thing about bacteria is that they reproduce so quickly. That makes it pretty easy to test simple logical conclusions based on the basic parts of the ToE. As for the theory changing once again, I'm rather happy to hear it. With something as complex as the origins of species, it's rather absurd to think we'd nail it down with a simple explaination in a couple hundred years. The introduction of new thoughts and ideas leads us closer to truth, so long as nothing is taken for granted.

[RobRoy]

I heartily agree with your second paragraph. But I should make two points. First, my statement ended with the word "evolve." What I actually meant was "evolve into existence." That's the big question that evolution just has not answered yet. And it offers no viable explanation. The key word there is "viable" since there are plenty of explanations thrown out.

Your petri dish is something I heard about in Jr. High. It goes something like this:

Take a petri dish full of 1 million samples of a living oragnism. They are the same except 5% of them are mostly red and the rest are mostly blue.
Bombard the dish with radiation that the red absorbs, killing the sample, but the blue is unaffected. In short order, you will have a bowl full of mostly blue samples and only a few mostly red. Now reverse the situation. That is, bombard it with radiation that blue absorbs and you will end up with most of the samples being mostly red again.

Nothing ever evolved here.

This is an over-simplification of course, but it covers the concept of evolution that is not really evolution.

[NJ_gent]

"What I actually meant was "evolve into existence."That's the big question that evolution just has not answered yet. And it offers no viable explanation. The key word there is "viable" since there are plenty of explanations thrown out."

I beg to differ. When the conditions thought to be present on early Earth are recreated in the lab, it's been shown that the building blocks of all living things on Earth today form spontaneously. Now, I don't know just how far the experiments have been taken, but I do know that amino acids formed on their own with no external (to the controlled environment) stimuli. DNA would have come much later. You certainly don't need a blueprint for a doghouse. :-)

"Nothing ever evolved here. This is an over-simplification of course, but it covers the concept of evolution that is not really evolution. "

My example was greatly oversimplified as well. Assume that we began with a single bacteria cell, and further assume that the petri dish was well suited for that bacteria to consume fuel. We know from a huge amount of experimental data that mistakes do happen while DNA is being replicated prior to cell reproduction, so we can further assume there is at least some genetic differentiation after, say, 100,000 thousand generations of bacteria in our little petri dish. So long as you have some that survive a toxin which would have killed the original bacteria cell, you've shown that genetic differentiation within a population, resulting from mutations, (I think that rhymes) drives natural selection without depleting the population. Thus, you have the basis for evolution - the process by which new species are formed over time via genetic mutations wherein the result is an organism better able to cope within its ecological system.

Things become far more complex when you look at more complex beings (such as apes), and that's probably why we're still struggling to understand the full mechanisms and nuances of the evolutionary process. That being said, and while I'm a big believer in the ToE (in basic principle, not in its current form), I'd certainly welcome an equally compelling theory with reasonably sufficient supporting evidence that rivals the ToE. I think it's rather silly when supposed supporters of science ignore and treat as irrelevant data which contradicts our current understanding of the evolutionary process. Personally, I think it's the questions that drive us closer to truth.