R. Bradbury said:
> Please define "adaptive mutations"...
> Now, if you simply mutate enough copies of your
> genome, sooner or later you *will* come up with
> an "adaptive" mutation. This doesn't require
> cellular "consciousness" or quantum evolution. It
> simply requires the basic application of the
> mechanisms we already to know to be the case. Now,
> if you had hard evidence that adaptive mutations
> were occuring *regularly* at *highly* improbable
> frequencies, then you might have a case for an
> interesting phenomena. However, to get those
> numbers you have to keep track of how many genomes
> nature threw away to get the adaptive variant. And
> those numbers are very difficult to come by in most
> situations.
As you probably guessed from context, "adaptive
mutations" are those that seem to violate the "sooner
or later" stuff. "Adaptive mutations" are those that
occur so rapidly as to seem highly improbable.
You're right that it is an issue of numbers,
probability; I cannot give you any. McFadden's outline
has references to journal publications involving
"adaptive mutations". His outline has no precise
numbers, but describes the results of experiments in
layman's terms.
An example he gives is a bacteria that is unable to
absorb lactose quickly undergoing mutations that allow
it to absorb lactose when deprived of anything else to
eat, and ONLY undergoing said mutation in that
situation (that is, a control colony of the same
bacteria does not undergo the same mutation in an
environment where it has food it can absorb).
Some suggestions as to how to "control" nanotechnology
involve having assemblers require a certain substance
to survive so that you have the option of depriving it
of that substance. Quantum evolution does not make
that approach impossible, but does make it more
complicated. That is, even if quantum evolution does
occur, I'm fairly certain I would perish if trapped in
an environment of only styrofoam. Quantum evolution
(if it exists) can only do so much. The mutation of
the aforementioned bacteria to allow it to absorb
lactose is probably a very simple one, unlike to sort
of mutation I would have to undergo to absorb
stryrofoam.
A digression: I often wonder whether information
theory has anything to say about how fast information
could be added to DNA by non-random selection of
random mutations. If you had models for the rate of
information being added, and you knew how much
information was stored in DNA, you could calculate how
long it would take. If the results were that it would
take too long, it would be reasonable to look for
phenomenon like quantum evolution to help speed things
up.
=====
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