From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Mar 13 2000 - 08:05:00 MST
On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, M. E. Smith wrote:
> I'm glad Anders brought that up, because quantum
> evolution's potential to be one explanation for
> adaptive mutations is one of the reasons why it's
> worth looking into. Of course, many still dispute
> the evidence that adaptive mutations exist.
>
Please define "adaptive mutations". Its well known
(now) that everything from bacteria to human cells
have methods for controlling self-mutation. In
bacteria its called error-prone repair and in cancer
cells its called a mutator phenotype (brought on
by damage to the mechanisms that prevent cell division
in the presence of mutations). These mechanisms provide
survival advantages in stressful environments, so it
is natural that nature would evolve them.
Now, if you simply mutate enough copies of your genome,
sooner or later you *will* come up with an "adaptive"
mutation. This doesn't require cellular "consciousness"
or quantum evolution. It simply requires the basic
application of the mechanisms we already to know to
be the case. Now, if you had hard evidence that
adaptive mutations were occuring *regularly* at
*highly* improbable frequencies, then you might have
a case for an interesting phenomena. However, to
get those numbers you have to keep track of how
many genomes nature threw away to get the adaptive
variant. And those numbers are very difficult to
come by in most situations.
Robert
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