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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (23742)	5/31/2006 12:35:38 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

Presumably, inducing mutations is an effective evolutionary strategy Surely you don't think that these bacteria are making a conscience decision to increase their mutation rate. It's merely a result of them having descended from bacteria who happened to survive because under stress their ancestors happened to regurgitate enzymes that caused mutations. Undoubtable many bacteria at the same time did not produce the enzymes, and they died out leaving the environment wide open for the survivors. That would be like suggesting that a baby decides to grow teeth at the appropriate time. It seems it can {does}, or at least changes the ones it has, or 'finds some'...or 'share' some: This is nothing more than sex in an organism that doesn't have specialized sexual organs. Sex is one of the great evolutionary innovations. It allows offspring to gain variations from proven surviving genes insead of relying of random mutations for the change. On top of that there seems to be the real posibility that 'genes' aren't the only code that might evolve: I'm not sure whether this is about biology or evolution in general. In general, evolution is the change that information undergoes under the pressure of selections. Darwin's work in biological evolution is greatly simplified by the fact that the information, genes, are inherited directly from parents and the selection is pretty much defined by survial or at least reproduction. It's valid to explore, for example, the evolution of ideas. Memes is the term usually used for a discrete concept (like tit-for-tat) that can be combined into complex philosophies. Memes can be inherited in many ways, and then recombined with old ideas. This would be like a current animal reproducing with a long extinct variety. Such feedback loops are inherently chaotic and so the study of the evolution of ideas is much more difficult than the study of lifeforms on earth. It is a large and growing field of research. TP