Evolution is a basic, biological process

You're going to have to clarify what exactly you mean by "fully formed". When you say that you think the fossil record should contain creatures that aren't fully formed it brings to mind images of animals with legs that stop at the knee because the rest of the leg hasn't evolved yet, or animals with lungs and hearts that haven't yet connected to the cirulatory system.Obviously no such animal could ever have existed, since if they did they'd be dead. No animal will ever have existed with a body only partly cabable of keeping it alive until reproduction (ignoring deformities of course, i'm talking generally here). What will be observed however will be a trend from one form to another consisting of a series of "fully formed" individuals with parts that all function properly.Take for example the transition from reptile to mammal. Mammals have a complex inner ear that reptiles don't have. Instead reptiles have a series of bones in the jaw that mammals don't have. The fossil record shows a transition from reptile like creatures (with extra bones in the jaw) to mammal like creatures (with extra bones in the ear). I don't have the pictures to show you, but i'm someone here has the link. It's shown a lot on this forum so i'm sure you could find it somewhere, probably in a thread about transitionals.

We're on different sides of the pond so I only really have the British usage of the word to go on. Evolution isn't as controversial over here as I gather it is in the USA. In fact I don't think many people give it all that much notice, not anymore than they give anything in science any notice anyway. I do agree that it is a widely used word though and probably not many people know what it means in a biological sense. I'd definately be interested to know what the poster meant by "fully formed", or more to the point what attributes a "partially formed" animal would have while still being alive.

I'm not sure that any organism could be termed a 'finished article' since mutation affects all DNA. There is no end point to reach. You're view is being obscured by the human urge to classify things. Classification is a great way to create some structure in what we see, but when used on non-discrete things it forces boundaries that aren't really there. When being viewed from a taxonomic perspective creatures are always going to be forced into one group or another. Taxonomists can't create a whole new group for every small change, the line has to be drawn somewhere. Instead of looking at the classifications and saying "It's still a mammal" or "it's still a bird", look at the physical characteristics. That way you can see the gradual change from looking like one thing to looking like another. I'm looking at diagrams of the skulls representing the transition from reptiles to mammals, and they seem to be in plenty of various stages of development to me. 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: Part 1Edited to correct spellingThis message has been edited by happy_atheist, 01-29-2005 18:27 AM

I'm no genetic biologist, but I imagine the situation would be more like the following....They start with bacteria X and know it's genome. As you said they will record the genome of this bacteria, and because this bacteria is the ONLY source of DNA in the experiment, anything that results can only come from altering this one.After this they let the bacteria reproduce, and due to the nature of bacteria, you don't just end up with Xa and Xb, but you'll end up with billions and billions of bacteria. Of course they'll all be descendants of the original bacteria X.It will of course be known that the original bacteria has no resistance to the bacteria, that won't be too hard to test. If the bacterial genome does not change in any way, then all descendants of the bacteria will die when subjected to the antibiotic. If some don't die, then something has changed to give them greater resistance. The fact that only some of them are resistant and the others aren't means that the ones that are resistant must have changed in some way that helps them.This doesn't mean it happened on demand, all the bacteria in the sample will likely be different from the original X. They will still die because what ever mutation they have will be unhelpful. Only if the mutation helps will it have any effect. The reason bacteria are used for the experiment is because they reproduce at such an exponential rate that the chances of a favourable mutation occuring in a short time are much higher than if you used a higher lifeform. A day in the life of a bacterial colony is probably better than many thousands of years studying humans. (The last statement is probably an understantement, but I thought that would be better than an overstatement). I don't know how long these types of experiment are run for, but the number of bacterial reproductions will be countless.So in summary there is only one source for the DNA. Any change means that a mutation has occured. If a favourable mutation occurs, this will not be the ONLY one that occurs. No doubt there will be some harmful mutations in there that quickly disappear, and a large number of neutral ones that don't do much at all. Theres no need to follow individual bacteria because they know they all originated from one DNA sequence and any changes are due to mutation. The number of bacterial reproductions that take place simply means that the chances of a favourable mutation occuring to give an advantage when subjected to the antibiotic is high enough to observe in a shorter time.(Again i'm not a biologist so this is just my interpretation of what i've read from more knowledgable people here. I fully expect corrections where necessary.)

Well I guess this depends on what Soplar meant by "directly observed". I have no idea if mutations can be observed occuring as the cell divides and reproduces, but even if it can i'm certain that it can't be tracked in billions of cells all at once. I doubt that this is the kind of "observed" that Soplar meant. More likely, he meant that the conditions of the experiment are controled to such an extent that we will be able to look at the end result and know what happened using our knowledge of how bacteria reproduce and how DNA works. Both of these things would be assumptions in the context of the experiment, but they will be directly known and tested from other areas of biology. Well not being a biologist I should probably leave this to Wounded King and the others who know more than me, but what the heck. I'll have a stab at it.Your model could work in one of two different ways that I can think of, either proactively or reactively. Either the variation will occur each time the bacteria reproduce, thus maximizing the number of different variations in the population. I can see two (possible) problems with this. Firstly, as I think has already been mentioned, this would lead to a higher than average mutation rate both in frequency and location in the genome and would be detectable. Secondly (and this is something i've just thought of so if i'm wrong i'm sure someone will correct me), but it would make the whole process useless in protecting the population because when the correct variation in the genome was found to infer resistance, what would stop it from being reshuffled when the bacteria reproduces again? There would be nothing to make the offspring resistant if the parents were, unless you're proprosing some mechanism to stop the reshuffling.Secondly is reactively (which I think is what you were implying), the reshuffling only occurs if the bacteria is in the presence of something harmful. If you measured the number of genomic differences (from the original bacterial genome that the colony started from) immediately before the antibiotic was introduced and then a few generations after the number should be very much smaller the first time than the second time. This would indicate that introducing the bacteria caused the changes to occur. I'm assuming this is not what is observed.Another possible implication from an ID/Creationist POV (for both proactively and reactively), is that if the variations were programmed into the DNA intelligently, you would expect there to be little to no directly harmful or neutral variations resulting. Neither of these would be of any use whatsoever. You would expect the number of potentially helpful mutations to be very much higher than evolutionary biology would predict. Again, I assume this is not what is observed. I have no idea if resistant strains are produced every single time, or even how long it takes for a resistant strain to appear on average. I imagine there are some different predictions for evolution and creation that can be made though. For example, from an evolutionary perspective I imagine the potency of the antibiotic will be relevant. If it is capable of killing all non-resistant bacteria in a very short time then I imagine there is less chance of the population becoming resistant than if it takes a while for the antibiotic to kill them all. From a creationary perspective where the changes are non-random I imagine the potency of the antibiotic shouldn't have as much of an effect, the resistance will always arise.Anyway thats my stab into the relative unknown. I'd be interested to know how much of what I wrote is actually meaningful