An Experiment to Demonstrate Evolution

[sophia8]

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?

 

[brodski]

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?

it wouldn't convince any people who currently deny evolution.
This would only be counted as micro-evolution, and it's unlikely that you will be able to run the experiment for long enough for you to prove macro-evolution to a fundie, that event is scheduled for the day after hell freezes over.

 

[Dr Adequate]

See the subsection "Yes, there are beneficial mutations" in the SkepticWiki article on [swiki]Mutation[/swiki].

 

[Rolfe]

Anything wrong with that?

Ethics. You'd never get ethical approval for an experiment that requires many many mice to starve to death.

OK - I just saw you addressed that. I still have problems imagining you'd get a workable version of this past an ethics committee.

Rolfe.

 

[Rolfe]

Anyway, all you're doing is saying you're only going to breed from the tallest mice for 20 generations, and you reckon you'll get rather taller mice at the end of that.

This is different from dog breeding, like, how?

Rolfe.

 

[Chris Hyland]

"It shouldn't take too long either - a mouse gneration is only a matter of weeks."

If only it was that easy, people who deny evolution will only accept the change of one species into another as proof of the theory. Although this has happened in the sense of two species diverging so that they can no longer interbreed (eg mosquitos in london cannot breed succesfully with those that have been isolated in the london underground), creationists will accept nothing less than a cat turning into a dog in a laboratory.

 

[Dr Adequate]

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.)

But if you remove the smallest mice from the population, then you don't need to move the feeding dispenser. You're just picking out the largest mice; and this is artificial selection.

 

[Apex Rogers]

Ahh, but this experiment has an intelligent designer, hence it would be undeniable proof that ID is true

[/sarcasm]

 

[Larry Barrieau]

Very Lamarckian. Lamarck was wrong that this sort of thing might cause inheritable traits. Experiments were done by cutting off tails of generations of mice to see if some would be born tailless. They weren't. The experimenters could have just looked at all the generations of Jewish men who had circumcisions and non reported being born without a foreskin.

 

[Imrational]

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.

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.

 

[kellyb]

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

.
I wonder if you might end up with mice that didn't wean till near adulthood, too?
Or maybe extremely cooperative mice that let others stand on them to get to the water?

It wouldn't prove trans-species evolution, but it would certainly be interesting....

 

[Mojo]

But if you remove the smallest mice from the population, then you don't need to move the feeding dispenser. You're just picking out the largest mice; and this is artificial selection.

So, to make this something more like "natural" selection, you would need to allow the smaller mice to starve? (rhetorical)

 

[Mojo]

Ethics. You'd never get ethical approval for an experiment that requires many many mice to starve to death.

Does this basically mean that any experiment that demonstrates the operation of natural selection would be per se unethical, as it would require a certain part of the population to be unsusccessful?

 

[bpesta22]

Does this basically mean that any experiment that demonstrates the operation of natural selection would be per se unethical, as it would require a certain part of the population to be unsusccessful?

success means only reproducing or not-- you wouldn't need to let the little buggers starve; just don't let em "do it"

 

[Elind]

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?

That's called selective breeding of characteristics already present, not evolution.

Now, if you were to first irradiate them.........

 

[Apex Rogers]

Sounds like the feeding tray is irrelevent here. Just let all mice over a certain length enter your experimental gene pool, and sequester the rest. It will ocme as no surprise when, after enough generations, most of the mice born to this population meet the length criteria.

 

[JamesDillon]

That's called selective breeding of characteristics already present, not evolution.

Evolution always works on characteristics "already present," though it may exapt them to new functions. Evolution progresses via minute changes to the pre-existing structure, driven by natural selection. And of course it's possible that, during the course of the experiment, there may be some random mutations resulting in taller mice, which would be preserved by natural selection.

 

[Elind]

Evolution always works on characteristics "already present," though it may exapt them to new functions.

Of course it "works on" what's there. What else would it work on? New functions are mutations, not preferential selection. Do you really think the turkey in your supermarket evolved from the gobblers in the woods? Of course not. The only reason you don't see any in the woods is that the foxes ate them all long ago.

Evolution progresses via minute changes to the pre-existing structure, driven by natural selection.

Sometimes, sometimes not minute.

And of course it's possible that, during the course of the experiment, there may be some random mutations resulting in taller mice, which would be preserved by natural selection.[

That was the point of my joke about the radiation which you missed, but otherwise, not bloody likely in the next few thousand years.

 

[VonNeumann]

.
I wonder if you might end up with mice that didn't wean till near adulthood, too?
Or maybe extremely cooperative mice that let others stand on them to get to the water?

It wouldn't prove trans-species evolution, but it would certainly be interesting....

...or end up with:
predator mice,
cannibal mice,
prostitute mice,
entreprenurial mice ,
high jumping mice,
pyramid gym mice,
etc etc.

 

[davefoc]

...or end up with:
predator mice,
cannibal mice,
prostitute mice,
entreprenurial mice ,
high jumping mice,
pyramid gym mice,
etc etc.

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.