Take the Atheist Challenge!!!

Actually evolution could stand a chance at explaining love. Keep a pair bond, better chance of offspring survivng etc etc.Just me putting forward my opinion that people never realise that evolution can effect behaviours too, not just physical adaptions.Unseul

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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life....

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But if most of the scientists don't believe in God, then where is that going to lead us?

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The truth hopefully, whatever it turns out to be. (If they find evidence of god, then it will become a relevent scientific theory)Unseul

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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life....

Mathematical formulaes are just about the only thing that can be proven, because we make up the rules.No science can be truly proven, there can be evidence, even i suppose some proof depending on how you read into the word, but no absolute proof.The bacteria, i was actually thinking about doing something like this as my final year project, but taking it to the extremes that creationists seem to need.The original bacteria could be sequenced, and it would not have the specific resistance encoded in its DNA, otherwise it would be resistant. All of its progeny will be almost exact replicates of it, because most bacteria are asexual (though some transfer of plasmids can occur, this is still not the same, as we still start with just one cell). However mutations will occur along the way, and the number of bacteria in a lawn on the average petri dish is going to be some truly absurdly high number. With this number of bacteria there will have been a lot of mutation (prokaryotes (bacteria etc, eukaryotes are more advanced organisms, (basically "before" and "with" a seperated nucleus)) do not have as advanced mechanisms to prevent mistakes occuring in the replication) With all these mutations occuring, a few of them will have developed a resistance to the phage.This resistance probably involves the changing of a certain sequence (im not familiar with the experiment myself). The sequence will be the one that the virus uses to target the bacteria. Of course it could be due to other things such as restriction enzymes (enzymes that can destroy foreign DNA).Now the phage has torn through the population leaving only these select few, the select few can now spread once more forming a lawn. As Rrhian said if you then reinfect the phage can also mutate (tho i assume you must use extremely large amounts of phage so to allow for one to have had the necessary mutations.)Now this is evolution. Random mutation is acted upon by a selection process that allows one organism to thrive over its intraspecific competitors. Just because it is done in a lab means nothing, there have been cases of evolution occuring in the field as well. One example i learnt today was that of Fasicola (a trematode worm that infects sheep) these worms were taken from England to Austrailia in the sheep stocks, however the worm requires a certain species of snail to complete its life cycle, this snail does not occur in Aus, however the worm evolved and adapted so that it could complete its life cycle in another snail.Random mutation with some sort of selection pressure, it all just works up from there really.Unseuledit to correct spellings etcThis message has been edited by Unseul, 05-10-2004 04:49 PM

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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life....

Like i said they will be almost exacts replicas, not because you are different from your bros and sis's, thats due to many complex things, such as crossovers during meiosis and the fact you are half your fathers genes and half your mothers (both random). However in a perfect world the bacteria would be perfect copies of each other. However in our flawed world the replicating machinery (for want of a better phrase) is not perfect, this means that different bases can be placed during replication, or segments can be missed out/repeated etc etc, there is a checking mechanism, however in bacteria it is very poor and so misses some, times that up by a few billion billion and you get a lot of variation.Parasites can be amazingly host specific, this type of worm only inhabits one type of snail out of the hundreds available in the uk, it had never even come into contact with the austrailian snail before. Although its not a guarenteed evolution, the likelyhood of it being perfectly adapted to this snail is beyond reasonable doubt due to likely variances in life styles/cycles/morphology etc etc etc, it would have had to adapted in some ways to be able to use the new snail.Heh, fossil evidence would be great if we could get dna from every skeleton we find however... a well documented retrotransposon (effectively a now defunct virus that just stays in our dna) is found in chimps and humans in almost exactly the same area, however we go back slightly further in the what are thought to be earlier lineages, ie primates in general, and this virus is not present. The likelyhood that this virus just happened to go defunct in both species, and end up in the exact same position of juink dna, is once again well beyond reasonable doubt.The fossils we have do point towards speciation, but as a lot of people here will tell you a transitional (i suspect this is where u r going) is effectively everything. Everything is a predecessor to something else (or it is now extinct) Im not to hot on where to find all the different fossils found and lineages etc, but i think Lam is quite good on it. You could try going to another of the forums and checking out a few threads on it.Another example of mutation is the mosquitoes that live in the underground system in London, those mossies that have been living in the tunnels for the last few decades can no longer interbreed with those living outside (speciation) due to various genetic changes. This has also been observed in similar circumstances with Drosophilia (an extremely well studied fruit fly), both in and out of the lab.Unseul

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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life....

Fair enough.Riverrat anything else u wanna know goto that thread ill keep replying, but im sure if u read thru that thread you'll glean a lot of info.Unseul

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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life....

As Sartre would have put it, acceptence of full and total responsibility over your actions and inactions.Its quite scary stuff, but i think that at times the concept of moral luck must play a role. But even so, still pretty scary.Unseul

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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life....