New Understanding of Environmental 'Fitness

[Tank]

Evolutionary Biologist's Work May One Day Help With Chronic Diseases: New Understanding of Environmental 'Fitness'

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2011) — Working to better predict general patterns of evolution, a University of Houston (UH) biologist and his team have discovered some surprising things about gene mutations that might one day make it possible to predict the progression of chronic disease...

...Putting in about five years on this project thus far, Cooper says this work represents just the start of their efforts in trying to find general patterns that will help them predict some aspects of how populations will evolve. With improved understanding of interactions, it might be applicable not only to natural bacterial populations, but also bacterial populations that evolve in a person...

This research is interesting in its own right. However the highlighted passage is particularly important when it comes to critics of the Theory of Evolution (ToE), that it is not capable of making predictions, and is thus not really science (they ignore the element of accommodation*). This sort of research demonstrates that as our understanding of the influences on organisms of mutation and natural selection improves that prediction may be possible.

*Accommodation. For a Theory to have scientific validity it must first 'accommodate' (explain) that which is already known. Only after this is done can it move onto prediction. The ToE has no problem accommodating existing observations and this alone makes it a valid Theory in the scientific use of the word.