How reliable is science? (The limitations of science)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, April 16, 2012, 00:48 (4603 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Also, there IS a testable claim made by ID, actually. Evolution is not sufficient to explain innovation(versus adaptation). That is testable. Ironically, that is the same way to falsify Evolution. It is falsifiable. All evolutionist would have to do is prove a single repeatable experiment that shows a completely new innovation as a natural process. ... Again, this would have to show a completely NEW function, not a new way of doing something that it was doing previously. When the question of a SINGLE example of this was posed to Dawkins, he couldn't answer it. 
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> > What's the experiment that I can go run tomorrow, that will allow me to reject or accept the claim in red?
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> > As for the "completely new" feature, I already posted one from a paper in 1982 in which a bacteria evolved a way to metabolize lactose after its capability to do so was deliberately destroyed. Every generation from the knockout was recorded and it was demonstrated that the new ability to metabolize lactose came from 
> > 1. Random frame shift mutations
> > 2. A gene with a different structure than the original, knocked out version. 
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> I gave the criteria, I am not a scientist and do not have the requisite background to design the experiment. However, I can tell you that the one you cited does not qualify because:
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> a) "its capability to do so was deliberately destroyed." This means it is not a NEW function, but rather one that it possessed at some point previously, albeit in another form. -No. When you "knock out" a gene, that gene is GONE, as if it never existed. There isn't a case I'm aware of where an organism was able to magically replace a knockout gene. -> b) This experiment occurred before knowledge about the pre-/post- processing that DNA performs, so while they may have destroyed one element, they may not have destroyed all of the elements that comprise that function. -A valid criticism, but you miss that the majority of specimens continued along just fine, for several thousand bacterial generations, with no alteration whatsoever. If what you say here is true, then the de novo function should have appeared in generations that weren't undergoing the slow frame shifts that eventually led to a *new* function. *All* of the organisms should have eventually regained an ability to consume lactose. -What I'd like to see, now that we know E. coli forwards and backwards, is this experiment rerun. -The fact that a new and different gene appeared demonstrates that the DNA wasn't simply "restoring" an old function. Contrasting the novel cellular line with the billions of other cells without the function -> c) See the part about non-interference. By necessity, it would have to be an unaltered specimen.-Why? Though bacterial resistance to antibiotics provides that argument, my engineering mind calls BS on this one, for the simple reason that we use gene knockouts *all the time* and as I said previously, when we knock something out of a genome, it doesn't come back.

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