Is Syamsu a creationist or an evolutionist?

The figures ahould either be 4:1 or 1:0.25, if they were 4:0.25 then the camouflaged would be reproducing 16 times as much. Why do you think these figures are meaningless? They show that, all other things being equal, the camouflage confers a very substantial fitness advantage. By comparing the figure for both population with and without predation you could show whether the advantage is dependent on the presence of predators. More data is what you seem to not want, you continually argue that less data is sufficient for Natural selection. I'm glad to see that once again your inspired guesswork is coming into play. So what doctors are doing with antibiotics is to increase the size of a particular population of bacteria until it becomes 'reproductively stable', does it matter if the patient dies before the population reaches stability? How should the doctor realise that taking out the competitors should promote growth of the resistant bacteria, the only way he would know this would be from a familiarity with previous work on natural selection among differing bacterial populations. The whole concept of some bacteria being resistant and some not is intinsically comparative.By studying the varying spectra of antibiotic resistance amongst bacterial populations doctors can work out the best regime of multiple antibiotic treatments to get rid rid of the largest numbers of bacteria.Why are comparisons between variants pernicious but not comparisons between environments and over time?

Not all comparisons between elephants and ants are meaningless.

I'm not sure how you hope to see your guesswork about looking at organisms solely in terms of reproduction substantiated unless you do it yourself, if you believe the answer is in the scientific literature all you have to do is start citing some examples, if you don't think there is any relevant research being done already then you have a much harder problem and may have to start the Syamsu Research Institute.In the mean time a useful example of how such a study entirely avoiding comparasions might be useful in evolutionary biology, so far one has been singularly lacking.For your antibitic resistance here is a reference relating to multi-drug regimens in order to minimise the generation of drug-resistant bacteria.

Well if you are looking at a proportional ratio of two alleles then you are always going to have a context of replacement as one can only go up as the other goes down.It is reasonable to argue, as you and I have discussed before, that this proportional approach is entirely inapplicable to a situation where an organism, such as the nylon eating bacteria, breaks into a previously unexploited niche where it has no competition, but it is only inapplicable if you want to treat both the nylon eating and non-nylon eating bacteria as one population, which seems daft if they operate in completely different niches and do not compete for any resources, obviously there will be no replacement in such an example.TTFN,WK

Dear Syamsu,As has been pointed out before, by me, it is meaningful to compare elephants and ants, indeed comparative biology is one of those 'whole organism in an environment' based disciplines of the type you seem to favour. Here are a few important biological factors shown by comparison of elephant and ant - Vertebrate Vs. Invertebrate, Small Vs. Large, R strategy Vs. K strategy, Colonial life history Vs. Individual life history, Endotherm Vs. Poikilotherm.I'm not sure that the fundamental premise that as soon as the ability to digest nylon appeared there became two populations is necessarily reliable. To show that it is you must demonstrate or provide evidence that nylon eating bacteria cannot survive without nylon. I'm fairly sure this isn't the case for either Flavobacterium strain KI72 or P. aeruginosa strain NK87. If the nylon digesting bacteris can live in an environment without Nylon then it is perfectly reasonable to discuss relative success.Scenarios: Assuming equal initial numbers of wild type and Nylon metabolising bacteria.1) Normal media, No Nylon. Either both strains live happily or possibly nylon digesting strain suffers some disadvantage due to producing a redundant protein.2) Normal Media, Nylon Present. Depending on the efficacy of the Nylon metabolism the Nylon digesting bacteria may show improved fitness relative to the Wild type strain or may not have a sufficient advantage to produce any difference from scenario 1.3) Minimal Media, only Nylon present as Carbon Source. Wild type cannot reproduce and remain at stasis or die off. Nylon digesting bacteria reproduce.The replacement event has occurred but obviously subsequent to that event you won't see a change relative ratio in the population if all of the Wild type have died of in the minimal media + Nylon enviroment. But you have still had your replacement and change in relative ratios. The Minimal media + Nylon is acting as a selective medium, cna you show that the nylon eating bacteria cannot survive on a normally permissive but not Nylon containing medium? Otherwise you are not showing a clear enough separation of the two populations, precisely as you failed to do in our previous dicussion of the evolution of photosynthesis. You seem to think these new forms appear de novo in the environment which is suited to them and forms lacking particular adaptions are forever barred from encroaching on that environment.Cheers,WK

Syamsu,Try not to be obtuse. Of course I don't look at situations with no variation if I am looking at comparisons, the point is that a situation with no variation would not be the one we are discussing, it would be your original clonal population which as we have endlessly discussed is obviously never going to tell you much about differential reproductive success nor evolution.Just for you though here are the situations on WT or Nylon metabolising based clonal populations-Scenario:1) WT- Growth until limiting factors take effect, I.e. nutrients or space run out.
NM- Growth until limiting factors take effect.2) WT- Growth until limiting factors take effect.
NM- Growth until limiting factors take effect.3) WT- Stasis or death.
NM- Growth until limiting factors take effect.Your nylon factory manager is a gigantic strawman, nevertheless I can envisage a number of situations where a knowledge of non-nylon eating strains might be vital. If you allow that these strains might evolve nylon eating capabilities then whatever steps you take to remove Nylon metabolising bacteria would have to be applied at any stage where potentially nylon metabolising bacteria could infect the system, or you would need to control for potentially nylon eating strains themseleves as well. As an example, imagine your scientists, studying only Nylon metabolising bacteria, find a useful gas which interferes with the NM bacterias metabolism and kills it, you have all your workers and machines fumigated with this gas and only allow your workers into the sterile area after decontamination with this gas. Unfortunately this gas is specific to NM bacteria, as your scientist might have known had they looked at any non NM bacteria. Consequently a non-NM strain insinuates itself into your clean area, unaffected by the gas, and subsequently evolves over many generations into a strain capable of metabolising nylon. Can you direct me to where? I can't track your paraphrasing offhand.Cheers,WK

Wonderful Syamsu,You have now shown us one more area of biology in which you are completely ignorant, that of comparative biology. The fact that there are a number of meaningful comparisons which can be drawn from Ants and Elephants does not mean that any and all comparisons of anything will always be meaningfull.It would be a basis for selection because as we all know, except possibly you, you can't select without having more than one variant. Selection between those two variants can only be gauged by a comparison such as their relative reproductive success, unless you would care to tell us how else it could be measured?I will agree that many bacterial strains extant do not metabolise Nylon, and even that many would not ecolve a system to metabolise nylon giving extensive evolitionary time. That doesn't matter, all it takes is one or two common non Nylon metabolising strains to make your non-comparative anti-bacterial approach useless.Why could I not compare Nylon metabolising and non-metabolising populations? I just suggested some explicitly comparative experiments a few posts back. The times comparative natural Selection as you call it fails to apply is when populations have no overlap, inhabiting entirely seperate environments, this is not neccessarily going to be the immediate result of a bacterial strain developing a Nylon metabolising system.Since the entire point of natural selection is arguably replacement then the fact that comparisons are neccessary to measure replacement is surely argument enough. All you need to do is show us how your simplified redefinition can describe replacement/ selection without any comparisons.TTFN,WK[This message has been edited by Wounded King, 11-10-2003]