From:    Matthew P Wiener
To:      All                          Jan-31-94 01:47PM
Subject: Re: Evolution is WRONG!!!

Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
From: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Message-ID: <2ijua0$76p@netnews.upenn.edu>
Reply-To: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: talk.origins

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Evolution makes numerous predictions.  For example, plate 
tectonics and radioactive dating make it very clear that the 
Hawaii chain of islands gets older as one heads northwest from 
the big island.  So evolution makes a great big prediction 
here: the various species will be distributed over the islands 
in such a way that the ones on Honolulu will be more closely 
related to the mainland species while the ones on Hawaii will 
be more closely related to each other than to the ones on 
Honolulu.  One can make this more precise over all the islands.

Care to predict what investigating a hundred species of fruit 
flies has come up with?  If you want numerical quantification, 
there are cladograms based on chromosome inversions, and 
dendrograms based on DNA sequencing.
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The first and most famous of all predictions of evolution is 
usually not thought of as such, but as a prediction it's solid 
gold, and one of the most astonishing in all of the history of 
science.  Lord Kelvin, the premier physicist of his day, 
objected to the time frame Darwin was describing in his first 
edition, based on Kelvin's best comprehension of the earth 
cooling from a molten state.  (Contrary to popular opinion, 
Kelvin did believe in evolution.  He just believed it was 
directed by the hand of God, and so went much faster than 
Darwin allowed for.)  Since Darwin wasn't too concerned with 
the physics and geology, he silently dropped the time 
estimates.  But the hard-core evolution-rules attitude, please 
leave God out of the science, gave a rather basic prediction: 
Kelvin was wrong, and something was missing in his equations.  
It turned out to be radioactivity.

I can't overstate this.  Physics then (and today) was the 
pinnacle of the sciences.  An argument from physics carried far 
more weight than any argument from biology.  Yet it turned out 
that the _physics_ was flat-out embarrassingly wrong.
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Naked mole rats are another wonderful prediction.  One of the 
most difficult problems with evolution, from Darwin on, is how 
to account for the social insects.  How does one evolve 
sterility?  Hamilton offered an explanation based on genetics 
in the sixties.  It was based on the peculiar genetics of ants, 
bees and wasps: the males are an X, and the females an XX.  
Given this, a female is closer related to her sisters than her 
own daughters.  But this explanation is unsatisfactory for 
termites, with normal genetics.  In the mid seventies, 
Alexander offered an alternative ecological explanation for 
termite eusociality, based on their difficult choice of habitat.

Because he took for granted that evolution is what made for 
termites, he could extrapolate what would happen to mammals in 
an analogous situation.  He described in his lectures at the 
time what such an hypothetical mammal would have to be like: a 
hairless subterranean rodent living in east Africa, since only 
there would conditions be right for his version of termite 
evolution to carry through.  And what do you know, after some 
time somebody recognized that animal he was describing, and so 
Alexander wrote a carefully worded letter to the world's 
leading (and only) authority on naked mole rats.  All at once, 
the weird breeding habits of NMRs made sense, and people 
realized that NMRs were also eusocial.
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Evolution predicts thousands of transitional fossil forms would 
be found.  Darwin staked his theory on this.  They've been 
found in amazing quantity.  See the [list].
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Of more recent vintage, the list is endless.  One that caught 
my eye a few weeks ago, and which I posted here, was the 
question of asymmetric mutation rates in DNA strands.  As is 
well-known, some programmers at some point realized that if the 
mechanisms of evolution often produce optimal or near optimal 
solutions to complicated problems, then this should be 
applicable as an optimization method.  This basic prediction of 
evolution is now the field of "genetic algorithms".  In 
fine-tuning the method, one asks, just how do mutations work?  
Standard implementations assumed mutation was symmetric.  The 
PNAS paper I recently desribed investigated asymmetric mutation 
rates for the leading and lagging DNA strands during 
replication.  They discovered that a superior optimization 
algorithm existed for a bin packing problem if one used 
different rates. The implicit prediction--that nature beat us 
to it--was verified by an indepedent research group.  From the 
point of view of this independent research group, who found 
asymmetric mutation rates in actual DNA of actual cells, the 
prediction went the other way: viz, GA algorithms would be 
superior if they used asymmetric mutation rates.

This work is eminently "numerical".
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A classic problem has been the nature and evolution of sex.  
All sorts of predictions abound here.  For example, life is 
difficult for parasites if the descendents' immune system is as 
different as possible from either of its parents.  Hence, the 
incest taboo.  Evolution predicts that an actual biological, 
not social, mechanism for enforcing this would exist in all 
parasite prone species.  It turns out that the smell of MHC-II 
(the key immunological recognition molecule) is a heavy factor 
in mate selection in mice.  Take an unrelated mouse, and paint 
it with odor of MHC-II of a close relative, and the opposite 
sex loses interest.  (For what it's worth, people too can 
actually discriminate MHC-II smells.)

Of course, some parasites are known to mutate at high rates.  
Why in the world would they do that?

The origin of sex is a popular topic.  It seems, at first 
blush, to be half as efficient.  OK, so you buy the 
recombinatino argument--changing genes around deliberately is 
good for the species in the long run.  Why two sexes?  Why not 
six?

Well, multiple sexes are known in some fungi, but overall, they 
are rare. The reason seems to be the following: evolutionarily 
speaking, multiple sexes are unstable.  There is a hierarchy of 
mating types, and a mutation that cheats vis-a-vis where it is 
in the hierarchy will survive.  The long range effect (if you 
believe in evolution) is to cancel the hierarchy into just two 
sexes.  So, evolution makes a definite prediction regarding 
some of these fungi.

What's your predictions?
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)