Testing Evolution Using Simulation

There have been various preliminary examples already, such as John Horton Conway's "Game of Life," Richard Dawkins's "insect generation" program [Blind Watchmaker, as I recall], some ecological population simulations, etc. The talkorigins.org Website may also have articles and links about this. Dawkins's "Methinks it is a weasel" example illustrates one simple idea, but it was too simplistic. This field may be in its infancy, but I think it will go far.

Yes, there are some simulations but many are not just as serious as it should be. They don't fully utilize the power of super computers. To the best of my knowledge, they create pre-life situation where a player is allowed to change the conditions. Its more like a game. How about building a simple organism. As we have built a synthetic organism(not quite synthetic), we should have known about, almost every bits and pieces of that organism. How about putting an organism and creating an environment we believe existed.

Hope you get what I mean. Game of life and other things you mention uses maths and algorithms that are in many ways seem to be childish.

"maths and algorithms that are in many ways seem to be childish."

What the h3ll passes for mature in your world?

Just askin.

Milo

Come on. You cannot be serious on this. These were used mainly for entertainment purpose. Are you serious about testing evolution through games and that too games that never uses the advanced computing technologies....

What would you use for a Beta test? "Take a fair to middling planet. Add water. Wait 4 billion years. Yep, got it!"

Seriously, though we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that evolution is true, we simply don't know enough about the specific mutations or the available niches/environments to realistically model the past. We don't even know the causes yet of most of the mass extinctions.

we need not model the bits and pieces of the past. We could just provide major environmental details. We CAN try it out. Because I suppose they will survive even in the most extra-ordinary conditions. And more over, We need not wait 4 billion years to know what might happen in 4 billion years. That's why I said we could use super computers.

But I think you do need the bits and pieces. Consider, for example, the return of mammals to the sea. We know that happened, but why? Was there suddenly an open niches due to some species going extinct? Was there a mutation that made that return advantageous? If so, what caused that mutation? And, so on.

No super computer can compensate for the lack of good input data.

Indeed, you only have to look at the simulations they use for weather forecasting.
Vast computing power and the accuracy?... well, say no more.
Del

Yep. The best weatherman I ever saw was an old drunk who did the morning farm news, maybe 4 to 7 am in the rural area where I grew up. They had a quarter mile lane from the highway to the station, so they put a phone in a locked box out by the gate. About six every morning, the old guy would walk out to the phone and call back to his partner and tell him whether it was wet, cold, windy, etc. Pretty good accuracy, too.

As I already told you, simulation as a proof of a model is ridiculous.

But I want you people to understand that simulation will work here. No mater how badly we change the conditions that existed they still work, because these are organisms that survive in extreme conditions. What I mean is we are never going to get what we have today, like humans coming after 4 billion years being simulated. If I did expect that, then I am the stupidest of all being on Earth.

Let me put up an analogy. Imagine a simulation that is trying to predict, what will be the best possible place in an ocean to float, no matter how badly the simulation was flawed the object that lands on an ocean will float.

Similarly, what I expect in the life simulation is, the organism may try to evolve in such a way that best suited the environment that we provide in our simulation. So whats wrong in trying.

There's nothing wrong with trying, but you'll neither prove nor disprove evolution by simulation.

The biggest problem with your idea is that even the best evolutionary biologists don't understand or even know HOW environmental factors affect evolution. They know why (e.g. some fish like mudskippers evolved the ability to breathe air because they live in oxygen-poor environments) but they don't understand how the environment triggered off the mutation necessary for the evoluton, and this is the single most important factor in your theoretical simulator.

Remember, DNA contains millions of nucleic acid strands (G-T-C-A), and changing several of them will result in a new species, a descendant of the original. This is what you really need to simulate, to see how changes in DNA change the organism, and you can't do that unless you understand both how DNA regulates the development and growth of an organism as well as how environmental factors affect it.

Until you can answer both of the above questions, the evolutionary simulators you criticized as immature games are the best that present technology can produce.

Someone did

If you begin with " create something like the most simple life form" isn't that a case for Intelligent Design? The conventional theory of evolution is dependent upon the appearance of life from the mindless and senseless, i.e. non-directed, random association of atoms and molecules.

Starting with life forms is biasing the observations to fit the predetermined expected outcome. Which is the reverse of the Scientific Method.

Because Evolution is still just a theory and there is no proof beyond a shadow of a doubt there are too many gaps that need to be filled. As such, the person creating the program would have to fill in the gaps with what they believe to have happened and as a result the result would be false.

Now, modern scientists are looking into the possibility that we were transplanted here from another world. They are looking into this because there is documentation from ancient times of extraterrestrial activity. They are theorizing that many of the biblical stories that we are very familiar with might just be history repeating itself.

Noah's Ark - It's impossible to fit two of every animal on a boat. However, they could fit the DNA of two of each animal on a boat that was set up as a DNA bank, we have DNA banks today.

The Virgin Mary - They've found ancient paintings showing Mary being artificially inseminated by real people and a space ship hovering in the background. We have artificial insemination today.

Sodom and Gommorh - They have found other sites of ancient civilizations besides these to fable cities that have been completely wiped out with the inhabitants all dead and perfectly preserved lying in the streets. They also found what appears to be a ground zero for a what could only have been something equivellent to a nuclear blast. We have nukes today.

They have ancient paintings of beings fighting in the skies in craft that are piloted with fire coming from their rear as propulsion.

Of course evolution is a theory. All science is theories. Gravity is a theory. Newton's Laws are theories. Some theories, such as evolution, are so successful that there is no question about the basic framework being correct.

You are correct in saying there are gaps in the details. We don't, for example, know exactly what went on with the eggs as our ancestors evolved from hard-shelled external egg reptiles to internal egg mammals. That doesn't change the veracity of evolution.

One very simple "proof" of evolution is your appendix. That's an organ which functions in cellulose eating animals to help digest that cellulose. We cannot digest cellulose, yet we retain a very small version of that organ. The only reasonable explanation is an evolutionary remnant, rather like the glovebox in which nobody keeps gloves.

That is an example of micro evolution.

The ideal that man evolved from Apes is macro evolution and that is where I have issues with.

For macro evolution to work then we have to go all the way back and that means we must have evolved from rocks. Not microbes. You have to go back to before microbes and that leaves rocks.

No, that's evidence of macro not micro. Micro is when a moth changes color in response to industrial pollution. An organ left over from when we were a grass-eating species is macro.

Besides, a poll taken at the local zoo revealed that 87% of apes claimed to not believe in evolution if they had to be kin to us.

I don't blame them, sometimes I wish I wasn't kin to us either.

The Macro evolution I'm talking about is things like the dog and bear evolving from the same species, when in the 1970's the theory was that bears and pigs were supposed to be closely related. They have the fossil remains of a creature they are calling the dogbear because they believe it was the ancestor that divided into the dog and bear. People believe that evolution takes place because of envirommental changes and that is the case in cases like our skin color origination was dark but we became caucasion because of the regions that our ancestors moved to and lived. That is micro evolution. Macro evolution is the major changes which pretty much amounts to when salamanders evolved into human beings. People have problems believing in the macro evolution of things because there are no missing links to connect the transitions. The dogbear theory doesn't jive with me because dogs and bears both live in the same environments.

Where does a litter of pups go off and continue breeding together to create a new species. It must of originated from the same litter of pups that divided into dogs and bears.

But, so far as anyone knows, there was no case where a bear was born to a dog. What you get is instead a mutation where a salamander is born with longer legs than usual. If it turns out those legs help that animal thrive, he has lots of offspring, some of whom also get the longer legs. If you now have any environmental change stressing the salamanders so that those longer legs really help, the short leg ones die out in that region. Then in a few thousand years, one of those long legged salamanders has a litter (Do salamanders have litters?) in which one pup has the spine lower on the skull. If it helps that this mutant can now see further, that catches on, and you have long legged, spine near the bottom of the skull salamanders. And, so it goes. Take two or three billion years and now their descendants are holding news conferences explaining why there is no state budget yet.

The appendix is no proof of evolution it merely demonstrates synchronicity, but how that synchronicity occurred is far from a scientifically proven theory.

Huh? What the devil is synchonicity?

I've got an organ in my gut that is a good place for digesting something I can't eat in the first place.

I've got a couple bones in my inner ear that used to be somebody's jawbones.

I've got the remnants of a tail left over from?

When I was a little pile of cells in my mom's uterus, I looked like a fish, then a pig.

Exactly how do you not see evolution here?

By the way, there are no proven theories, not evolution, not gravity, not anything. Science never proves; it can only disprove.

"Huh? What the devil is synchonicity?"

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/synchronicity

synchronicity (plural synchronicities)

1. (uncountable) The state of being synchronous or simultaneous.
2. (Jungian psychology) Coincidences that seem to be meaningfully related; supposedly the result of "universal forces"

Get it?

All of these perceived meaningfully related coincidences which you cite only demonstrate coincidence not evolution.

Getting back to the OP question, a computer simulation is probably impossible -- too many inputs. However there are mathematical computations which demonstrate that there has not been enough billions of years of earth's existence for life to have evolved by random chance interactions of atomic particles.

Darwin, btw, in his book "Origin of the Species" notes that not enough time has passed for life to have evolved.

I understand the definition of synchronicity; I simply see no application to my post, or really to the whole debate. That sounds like a "talking point".

Really, you have to explain this very simple coincidence: If you examine a large number of human foetuses in their early stage, you find not little people but rather little fishes, anatomically similar to what you would find if you examined what we call real little fishes. Even the circulatory system is similar, later changing to the one like we humans have.

The description for this is "Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny", which has been shown to have too many exceptions to be useful as a scientific theory, but still remains a insurmountable barrier for anyone who tries to deny evolution.

As for the time consideration, the key word is "chance". Scientists have generally recognized for a very long time that there were periods of rather intense mutation. Stephen Jay Gould talked about "puncuated equilibrium". Certainly we are fairly sure today that the earth experienced periods of increased radiation in the past.

I've no problem if you choose to deny evolution. I personally read my horoscope from time to time. But, it doesn't sit well to attempt to misuse science to deny scientific truth.

Science is always used to deny "scientific proof". That's why science has experiments and that's what moves knowledge forward. At one point in western history the contemporary science of the time observed that the heavens circle the earth was "proof" that the earth is the center of the universe.

Punctuated equilibrium was Gould's invented phrase as an attempt to explain away the logical and empirical obstacles to scientific proof of Darwinian evolution. P.E. is not a scientific proof or even explanation, it's a wild guess.

A true scientific theory must state what test would challenge it's truth as well as what would confirm the theory, if it can't do that it's just theology.

Actually, there is no good reason, save the very complicated celestial mathematics, to not have the earth be the center of the universe. So, that's a lousy counter-argument.

Do you have an alternative to evolution?

Nope, I don't have any scientific proof of evolution. I can point to solid evidence of the multitude of life but not the reason for the multitude of life.

Just because it looks like a pig at some point doesn't mean it is a pig.

Look at the stages of becoming a butterfly.

A caterpiller looks nothing like the butterfly or moth that it is to become. Same goes for beatles and all other insects. Some are hatched in water to later polymorph into some type of fly or mosquito.

Look at the amphibians. Both frogs and salamanders start out as polywogs so we can say we evolved from frogs because our sperm looks like polywogs.

No, but it does mean it has the fish (I'm switching animals to avoid offense to some readers) genes. Where did it get those? Ancestral DNA.

Sorry, but the evidence for evolution is just too overwhelming.

When you speak about evolution, you are trying to find links between known evidence, happenings and facts. You cannot get to the first happening that started evolution in motion and you can't predict the final outcome of evolution. We are not there yet and we will never get there. IMHO it's a futile exercise, like trying to understand God.

Personally, I like your idea. While it may be off, we've got a pretty good idea of what comprised the original chemical soup. From there we have a fairly good idea of the climate over millions of years. Feed a super computer every bit of known data that we have and see what it comes up with. At the very least it would be interesting. Somehow I suspect that it wouldn't be humans though.

andyarok,

You can get an idea of the complexity of such a task by looking at a very small simulation done by Nilsson and Pelger at Lund University. They had to bust their butts to just do a complex eye (the so-called camera eye). But, anyway, it's been done. A computer simulation showed the evolution of the eye, strongly supporting macroevolution, and showed the time required for evolution is no problem.