I had a really stimulating conversation with Marian tonight. Hmm, it's 2, I should be asleep by now.
First, have you ever taken a really good look at the amazing vegetable that is the beet? It isn't amazing so much for the flavor as for the fact that the intensity of the color of the juice and flesh rivals that of dioxozine violet, which has the highest intensity ranking of any pigment in my stash of probably hundreds of paint tubes. I was cutting beets up tonight, and I almost whipped out a round #6 to dip in the juice and start sketching. I told Marian that if I ate only beets for a solid month I'd start turning purple. Biochem genius little sister doesn't think so for all sorts of sciency reasons. But gorsh... it's just so purple! How couldn't you change color??
Then, second, evolution (again). Marian is a stout girl, it is not easy to believe what she believes in her circles. This was my question. Well, this isn't directly my question, I need to work up to it. Evolution takes a looong time. But the reason it takes so long isn't because the process is necessarily slow, it's because it is un directed. If you think about it, we can speed up the evolution process probably by a factor of a million, by eliminating the probability problems involved with having a one-in-a-million horse needing to find another of the opposite sex. We've known this for thousands of years, it's why we have chihuahuas and Saint Bernards, corn, reasonably sized strawberries, wheat, etc.
We have lab rats that can reproduce every month or something. We have generations and generations to work with, in which we can selectively sort, and breed. Fruit flies are even faster, and my sister's bacteria have a duplication time or (or something... sorry, Marian...) of like, 20 minutes.
So my question is, if we can do all this, why has no one, in the lab, thus far, to my knowledge, demonstrated a rat becoming something, like, oh, I dunno, a mouse? Maybe that's a little extreme, here's a little easier. How come, with the thousands of generations of rats we've bred, no one has come up with something that is not a rat. Start with a rat, and get something that is not a rat. Fruit flies - we can do all sorts of crazy things with them. Genetically warp them to get eyes on the ends of their antennae, etc. So, how come, with the billions of fruitfly generations that have come and gone, we don't have any examples of someone starting with a fruit fly, selectively breeding, and ending up with something not a fly? Or, starting with E.Coli, and becoming not E.Coli?
Here is a graph I cooked up in 30 seconds. Actually, I am going to make it up after I type this sentence, but I'm assuming it will only take me 30 seconds (maybe less) because I already have this sweet function that outputs noisy signals:
This is a white noise signal, I won't go into the details of what that means. The important thing is that, if you had 1000 seconds, or 10000 seconds of perfect, infinite band white noise, it would all average out to (nearly) the same thing. But if you look at how the signal is changing, from 0.1 second to 0.2 seconds, you might conclude that, given 3 more seconds, your signal might end up near -130.4, instead of near 0, like it actually does.
Relating the graph to canines, (this is a thought experiment) what if you were to consider the vertical axis of the graph to be variation in dog-ness. Maybe an abnormally high vertical spike is a Saint Bernard, and negative spike is a Weiner, and 0 is your "platonic dog form" or whatever. No matter how hard we try breeding, and we've been doing it for thousands of years, we can't change the average, we can't change any one component of the signal so that it starts branching away from the average, 0. But, if you were to look at any 10 or 20 generations of intense selective breeding, you might honestly think that you were.
I'm willing to believe that evolution like the type proposed by scientists everywhere, actually occurs, if someone can show me that they can take a dog, and another dog, and turn it into not a dog, using selective breeding. Like my Uncle Ted pointed out, Christians have been proposing this sort of test for thousands of years. "If Baal is God, worship him. But if YHWH is God, worship him."
I have been in the "scientific community" long enough now, to realize that things are never, (ever) as cut and dry as BBC would have you believe. I work in acoustics. Physical acoustics can be a very clean science. I am dealing with gas properties, and experiments are often extremely repeatable. The outcomes can be modelled with an almost arbitrary accuracy, depending on how closely you want to simulate the environmental conditions. But even in this field, which is relatively simple compared to the workings of biological systems, there are unsolved mysteries. We aren't even close to knowing everything yet. The smartest minds in the field still argue with eachother over all sorts of things.
So I guess I can boil these thoughts down to 2 questions:
1) If evolution actually occurs on the scale that people claim, why hasn't anyone reproduced this kind of thing with rats or fruitflies? Why do we still have dogs, for all our thousands of years of trying to make them something else?
and
2) Why are people so certain? "The fossil record is obvious." Whatever. I've seen the half-frog half-fish fossils, the hominid skulls, the "feathers" on late dinosaurs, the spurs on Boa's, etc. But I've also heard geniuses differ on how to assemble the facts found in fields that are far, far, words almost can't express how far, simpler. People honestly expect me to believe that the fossil record is "obvious?" Turn your drisophila into a housefly, and I'll take evolution, as proposed, off the theory shelf.
[Hilary making a small splash. Foto: Amelie Von Bibra]
