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An Experiment to Demonstrate Evolution

davefoc said:
exactly the direction I was thinking about but perhaps it goes further.

Maybe, at some point one of the mice using his recently seclected for super intelligence successfully escapes his captors and begins to implement his plan to take over the world aided by his dimwitted buddy, Pinky.

But Rolfe, the courageous and beautiful laboratory veterinarian, steps in at the last moment to foil the super intelligent mouse's (aka "the brain") plot and the world is saved.
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Dude, that would make for an awesome TV show!!!:p
 
sophia8 said:
You get a colony of lab mice, housed in cages where the feeding dispenser is above their heads; the mice have to stand on their hind legs and stretch to get fed. With each new generation, you move the feeding dispenser up a little bit higher.(Naturally, you don't allow the shortest mice to starve to death - you remove them before they get dangerously underweight.)
After, say, 20 generations, you should end up with mice that are significantly taller. It shouldn't take too long either - a mouse gneration is only a matter of weeks.

Anything wrong with that?
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Sounds a lot like breeding cats and dogs.
 
sophia8 said:
You get a colony of lab mice, housed in cages where the feeding dispenser is above their heads; the mice have to stand on their hind legs and stretch to get fed. With each new generation, you move the feeding dispenser up a little bit higher.(Naturally, you don't allow the shortest mice to starve to death - you remove them before they get dangerously underweight.)
After, say, 20 generations, you should end up with mice that are significantly taller. It shouldn't take too long either - a mouse gneration is only a matter of weeks.

Anything wrong with that?
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Most ID people do not deny that some evolution is going on and has an effect, they claim, that the big changes cannot happen via evolution.
So only an experiment, where you get through evolution fish to breath water or mice to live purely in water would convince them of anything.
And that'll take long.

Carn
 
Did you look at my link? That experiment produces two strains of bacteria which can't live in the same environment. Will that do?
 
Dr Adequate said:
Did you look at my link? That experiment produces two strains of bacteria which can't live in the same environment. Will that do?
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Afaik creationists argue with irreducible steps in evolution.
E.g. a creature lacks organs to get oxygen from air, but can extract oxygen from water. Even if they go land often, natural selection will just favor those, who can hold their breath long enough, devloping a small organ(a few cells) for getting oxygen from air is not a evolutionary significant advantage and devloping immiediately lungs is too unlikely step. Therefore lungs could have never deleoped.

I do not know whether creationists argue with lungs, but they use a similar argument about some other stuff(irreducible complexity).

I do not know whether you're bacteria fall into that category, but to convince creationists, one has to show, that even changes, where big changes can happen, even if partial steps toward the big change are not favored evolutionary.

Carn
 
Imrational said:
Um, Larry... what he was suggesting wasn't Lamarckian. If he suggested the act of stretching to reach the food caused the mutation, then it would be Lamarckian. Instead, he was suggesting that only tall mice could reach the food, allowing the tall mice to be favored to survive over the short mice. Eventually, the taller (naturally selected mice) would predominate. That's natural selection not Lamarckian.
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That's exactly what I'm suggesting - evolution in action. As Rolfe points out, it's not that much different from dog breeding, but it's scientific dammit! Thecreationists are always saying that evolution is just a theory - well, here's a scientific emonstration of evolution!
BTW, my husband says I'm not male. He's usually right about these things.
One MAJOR problem with the proposed study (and I'm surprised that noone mentioned this) is that baby mice would be shorter than adult mice and would therefore "die off" first. The experiment wouldn't last one generation.
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Yes, I hadn't thought of that. Perhaps there would be some way of feeding the juvenile mice in isolation until they were adult?
 
Well, as I said, it's exactly like dog breeding. The breed standard in this case says "as tall as possible", so you only allow the tallest 10% or whatever to breed, and hey presto, in a number of generations your population is significantly taller than the original stock.

Or it's like that Siberian fox study where they bred for docility that was discussed last week.

I just don't see how this would convince anyone of anything, any more than looking at a Pekingese dog.

Rolfe.
 
Carn said:
E.g. a creature lacks organs to get oxygen from air, but can extract oxygen from water. Even if they go land often, natural selection will just favor those, who can hold their breath long enough, devloping a small organ(a few cells) for getting oxygen from air is not a evolutionary significant advantage and devloping immiediately lungs is too unlikely step. Therefore lungs could have never deleoped.
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Okay, let's do evolution of lungs.

The creationists' big mistake is to suppose that the claim being made is that first there were fish that walked on land, and then they evolved the capacity to breathe out of water.

This is patently stupid, and no-one could possibly believe it.

Obviously it must have been the other way round.

What in fact happened is this. Fish can gulp a mouthful of air and absorb it through their membranes. (Think about smoking a cigar as an example of something similar.) This gives an extra oxygen resource for surviving in stagnant waters. This means that for fish living in stagnant waters, there was a selective pressure to be good at this, and apart from biochemical improvements, the only way to improve this is to increase the surface area of membrane in contact with the air. Hence the complex inpouching we call lungs. Hence their location.

So in fossil fish such as Eusthenopteron and Panderichthys we see true (though primitive lungs) and also a choana --- an airway between the nostrils and the main airway. They were in other respects fish, and they had gills. They were, we may not, lobe-finned fish, so their bony anatomy already contains many interesting homologies of form with the tetrapods.

Later, we get creatures such as Acanthostega and Icthyostega, which have primitive limbs, which could drag them on land but not bear their weight, and which also retained internal gills.

In modern amphibians, of course, gills are lost in adulthood.

I hope that makes things clear.
 
davefoc said:
exactly the direction I was thinking about but perhaps it goes further.

Maybe, at some point one of the mice using his recently seclected for super intelligence successfully escapes his captors and begins to implement his plan to take over the world aided by his dimwitted buddy, Pinky.

But Rolfe, the courageous and beautiful laboratory veterinarian, steps in at the last moment to foil the super intelligent mouse's (aka "the brain") plot and the world is saved.
Click to expand...
You really think only taller mice would survive?
No room, whatsoever, for behavioral adaptation?
 
Rolfe said:
Well, as I said, it's exactly like dog breeding. The breed standard in this case says "as tall as possible", so you only allow the tallest 10% or whatever to breed, and hey presto, in a number of generations your population is significantly taller than the original stock.

Or it's like that Siberian fox study where they bred for docility that was discussed last week.

I just don't see how this would convince anyone of anything, any more than looking at a Pekingese dog.

Rolfe.
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Rolfe - I'm not a scientist; I don't even play one on TV. I was just suggesting an experiment to show evolution in action. Something that maybe a bunch of biology students could do as a long-term project.
I've thought of a modification to my experiment. Have two feeding dispensers, one at a height that shorter mice and juveniles can reach. However, it would only dispense the minimum of food - enough to keep the mice this side of starvation.
The taller mice would thus be better fed. Now, it's my understanding that better-fed animals get more mates and breed more progeny. If so, this would be a way of breeding "giraffe" mice without either starving any mice to death or selectively removing mice from the experiment.
 
How do you ensure equal distribution of food amongst the short and juvenile mice?

(edited for typos)
 
If the point is merely to select for height (length), rather than gymnastic skills, and the experiment is intended to be humane and ethical, then I see no point to the peculiar positioning of the food containers. Simply select the tallest (longest) 10% from each generation to continue to provide the germ lines for the following generations.

Rolfe.
 
The point is to avoid human selection, and let nature demonstrably do the selecting.
But really, this whole thing was only a suggestion, sparked off by reading about Creationism and Larmarckism. I just thought it would be a good idea for something like a student project.
Seems not.
 
If you deliberately set up an experiment to let "nature" do the selection, that implies that some animals will suffer. I don't think you'd get ethical approval.

Rolfe.
 
How about taking a common insect, say ants or fruit flies and separating them into totally different environments. The insects would evolve/adapt to fit the environmental pressures affecting them. Eventually, you might get ants that could no longer mate successfully.
 
Imrational said:
How about taking a common insect, say ants or fruit flies and separating them into totally different environments. The insects would evolve/adapt to fit the environmental pressures affecting them. Eventually, you might get ants that could no longer mate successfully.
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Still wouldn't establish "macroevolution" to the satisfaction of the creationists. Speciation has been observed dozens of times; but they point out that, species or not, the creatures remain of the same "kind."
 
drkitten said:
Still wouldn't establish "macroevolution" to the satisfaction of the creationists. Speciation has been observed dozens of times; but they point out that, species or not, the creatures remain of the same "kind."
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Lets face it, nothing short of Jesus quoting extensively from "on origin of species" during the 2nd coming would convince fundeis of "macro" evolution.
And even them some of them would claim that Jesus had been misquoted by the "liberal media".
 
It's also probable you would get theft of food from tall mice by short mice, operating in groups, leading to mouse muggings and the invention of mouse mafia. Or indeed mouse cannibalism.
Congratulations- you have evolved civilisation! On the seventh day, you may rest.
 
brodski said:
Lets face it, nothing short of Jesus quoting extensively from "on origin of species" during the 2nd coming would convince fundeis of "macro" evolution.
And even them some of them would claim that Jesus had been misquoted by the "liberal media".
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... which raises the question about why we're wasting the cage space and mouse food on this experiment in the first place.
 
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