Originally Posted by
garyd
Get back to me when something simalar happens outside of a laboratory. You have now proven conclusively that which every religionist on the planet could have told you before you started. To wit to get much more than terribly minor changes within a species requires intelligent interference in the natural order of things.
Did you actually look at what they demonstrated? Let me spell it out:
-Species are able to greatly increase their fitness to their environment through purely through random mutations and asexual reproduction
-Species are able to use successive neutral or beneficial mutations to build up a complex change
-Purely through the processes developed above, a species is able to develop a hugely beneficial trait that completely changes its relationship with its environment and allows it to easily out compete all of its parent generations
-This can happen over relatively short periods of time
If religionists believe that, I don't see anything more that really needs to be discussed.
Originally Posted by
fazisi
I read the wiki article and was slightly impressed. But there still exists several doubts which this experiment does not address. I am also slightly wanting to agree and disagree with garyd. While this experiment is done within a laboratory with very controlled variables of climate, this is for testing purposes since it becomes extremely hard to do comparison tests in the natural environment.
Well, yes, obviously it's harder to repeat the experiment in nature because you can't control as many variables. That's sort of the point of doing a controlled experiment. In this case, they showed that mutation alone is sufficient to generate new, beneficial traits. If I want to test Newton's Three Laws, I'm not going to do it by trying to figure out whether I can use them to calculate the trajectory of a thrown boomerang in a windstorm--I'm going to test them on something simple, where I can control for variables that aren't interesting, to test only the relationships that I care about. Once the principle is established, then I can see how it responds to other influences. This is how science works. But the thing is, I don't need to be able to figure out how a thrown boomerang behaves in a windstorm to be able to establish that Newton's Laws work exactly the way that theory predicts they will.
I point out that many well-accepted theories have been accepted on the basis of a single effective experiment. General relativity worked pretty much this way. The nuclear model of the atom was too. And the Copernican model of the solar system. I'm sure I could come up with others.
Originally Posted by
fazisi
In other words, this is kid's-stuff test on evolution. There should be other groups foaming at the mouth for some funding to conduct some more complex experiments using this one as proof of concept.
I'm sure there's other research groups looking for ways to enhance this work (this experiment is still technically ongoing AFAIK). The proof of concept is the really important part anyway.
Hoping to win with every class, doomed. Archer, Barbarian, Bard, Beastfighter, Druid, Elementalist, Farmer, Fighter, Monk, and ULE Priest down.