>Can anyone offer feedback on the following statement:
>
>> evolutionary theory has little proven
>>relevance to the actual day-to-conduct conduct of modern science,
>
>What about the development of antibiotics, the classification of
>organisms, etc? Can you give me a concrete explanation of how
>evolutionary theory is used in applied scientific/biological/medical
>endeavors? And the statements, "You are going to have to give me some
>pretty strong evidence that formulating medicines, vaccines, and pest
>controls "depends" in any way upon the evolutionary theory like
>engineering depends upon the laws of physics. Are you saying that
>there are actually medicines, vaccines, and pesticides that could not
>have been developed if the general theory of evolution were wrong?"
Yes, yes, and yes.
Random mutation and the generation of functional proteins:
Random processes can produce new functional units in a selective
environment. Highly functional and surprisingly long RNA ribozymes have
been generated experimentally from random sequences.
Joyce, G.F., "Directed molecular evolution," Scientific American 267, no.6
(1992): 90-97.
Ekland, E.H., Szostak, J.W., and Bartel, D.P., "Structurally complex and
highly active RNA ligases derived from random RNA sequences," Science 269,
(1995): 364-370.
Design of enzymes by directed evolution:
Roth, A. and Breaker, R.R., "An amino acid as a cofactor for a catalytic
polynucleotide," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 95,
(1998): 6027-6031.
Laboratory evolution of proteins:
Stemmer, W.P.C., "Rapid evolution of a protein in vitro by DNA shuffling,"
Nature 340 (1994): 389-391.
(The last two examples are discussed in Kenneth Miller's new book "Finding
Darwins God" (1999) published by Harper/Collins.)
Directed evolution is being actively used to evolve compounds with desired
catalytic activities. It is easier and much faster to let random mutation
within a selective environment evolve compounds with the desired capacities
than to try to design them from scratch.
(Ruth here) Engineers can and have on occasion come up with very good
inventions when they were ignorant of the relevant laws of physics which
explain the operation of those inventions. However, as soon as those
inventions are examined, their operation is found to be correctly described
by the laws of physics--a confirmation of those laws as successful
theories. In exactly the same way, biologists/pharmacists etc have found
successful medicines, pesticides etc "accidentally", without using
evolutionary theory to predict their correct function. But, when the
operation of such medicines etc is examined, it has thus far at least
always been a confirmation of evolutionary theory.
Keith
Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
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