We know that evolution can be rapid, when dangers confront a species. The NY Times has an article which discusses the 50 year change in an endangered fish in the Hudson river from PCB contamination. A block of six bases was deleted from one gene to accomplish the feat. The mechanism for the gene change is not known.-
James Shapiro is coming out with his book on his approach to evolution. Don't expect Darwin!!-http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-View-Century-James-Shapiro/dp/0132780933/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1308156663&sr=1-1

Except that we have no clear examples of a single celled organism, or group there of, communicating with each other and deciding to form together to become a multi-cellular organism... and on and on. Yes, this accounts for variety, no, it does not account for speciation.-Nothing proves speciation is a result of chance, in fact, we have no idea how it occurs.

Secondly, it's your preordained "framework of driving evolution to create humans" that I find unconvincing in the light of the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush of species which come and go. Adaptation to change does not indicate that bacteria are preordained to evolve into humans! On the contrary, their being "programmed" to remain as bacteria suggests to me that they are an end in themselves.-BUT, view it a different way: bacteria are very successful, as shown that they have survived for 3.6 billion years or so. But somehow or other they became multicellular also, and that set of organisms became more and more complex. They invented sex which made the dispersal of various types of organisms even more complex and more varied as a wider range of DNA became more and more mixed together. From this process humans arrived. Some branches of organisms ran out of steam and stopped but stayed around in stasis. Others, less successful, diappeared completely. But humans did arrive, and that suggests directionality built into evolution. See Michael Denton's book : Nature's Destiny, 1998. No one has said that directionality has only one road to follow. As Yogi Berra once said, "if you come to a fork in the road, take it!"

I have absolutely no problem with the idea that the mechanisms of epigenetics enable organisms to protect themselves against environmental changes, but firstly these mechanisms, as far as we know, do not change organisms into different species ... they result in adaptations not innovations. Secondly, it's your preordained "framework of driving evolution to create humans" that I find unconvincing in the light of the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush of species which come and go. Adaptation to change does not indicate that bacteria are preordained to evolve into humans! On the contrary, their being "programmed" to remain as bacteria suggests to me that they are an end in themselves.--If the are 'programmed' to remain bacteria, then evolution between species, and in particular from vastly less complicated to vastly more complicated would not occur. What I find even more intriguing is the method of their communication, which directly ties one of the four basic forces directly to life. i.e. Electromagnetism.


> This will not, of course, lead to innovation, but my comparison here is with intelligent cooperation WITHIN organisms, which may lead to adaptations or innovations. I'm fully aware that such inventive, intelligent mechanisms are highly unlikely to come into existence by chance. My tentative suggestion is that in the course of evolution they do not follow a pre-ordained programme (David's version) and they do not depend on random mutations (the Darwinian version), but themselves initiate and develop changes from within.-In this article bacteria create a new chemical way to methylate DNA and become resistant to seen classees of antibiotics. This is epigenetics at its best. You misunderstand my 'pre-ordained' theory of evolution. Part of the theory that evolution has built in directionality includes giving organisms the ability to protect themselves from sudden environmental changes within the framework of driving evolution to create humans. It is quite clear that epigenetic changes are a powerful evolutionary tool.-http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-bacteria-evolved-unique-chemical-mechanism.html


> I'm still confining myself to innovation, and for me testing against geochemical changes means adaptation. You move onto epigenetics again before returning to what I see as the crucial question: How do we suddenly have entirely new species? "Darwin's guess is not supported in the fossil record as Gould has shown.-There is a marvelous old video starring Eldridge and Gould on puntuated equilibrium with an explanation of their version of the theory: stasis and then a burst of new branching, bush style over 50-100 thousand years, on blog Sandwalk, today.-http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/


> Yet you have made an amazing point: in histology I learned to identify organs by the microscopic slice. Liver cells don't look like kidney. Lung is nothing like an adrenal gland. Lymph nodes are not anything like skin cells. And the brain can only be brain, the spinal cord has its own pattern. The body IS a community of organs, all functioning in great cooperation. A community of communities, like London and its suburbs. But everyone of these cells has the same DNA! And George tells us it all came from inorganic chemicals that fell together by chance.-How epigenetics help the different kinds of cells (about 200) stay the same and maintain their identity:-http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/58007/

I have suggested that innovations may be produced by internal mechanisms that have some form of intelligence of their own, as opposed to being programmed by a UI to lead evolution to humanity, or being thrown up by random mutations.
> 
> DAVID: You are theorizing completely. I have presumed a directed pattern. -The following looks like directed pattern. Slime mold single-celled organisms, can group together, form a stalk with protein seen in multicellular organisms. One research person comments that genes can be adapted to new functions, and multicellularity may have been an easy jump! Looks like directed evolution, pre-planning, to me:-http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/58047/


> Latest discoveries in evolution showing deletion of non-coding segments of DNA evolved humans away from other primates. Regulators of genes are removed for this to occur.
> 
> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-dna-human.html-In all the major science blogs I follow this is the story of the week. The article in Nature has been widely accepted as a carefully done, elegent study. The researchers were able to show that deletion of long segments of modifying DNA, that is, non-gene segments that controlled gene expression, possitively or negatively, enhanced human development from the common primate ancestor of six million years ago. Thus mutations may make changes, as originally proposed by Neo-Darwinism, but a deletion in the so-called 'junk DNA' can also accomplish major changes, perhaps more rapidly than mutations can. Most mutations are deleterious, some neutral and a few are helpful. Using mutations alone reasonably might take much longer than six million years. Whatever mechanism caused the deletions to occur, they seemed to have speeded the evolutionary developments that were identified: genital and neural/ brain. Wow! Lose DNA and get a much bigger brain!


> I think we are close enough to each other to agree that DNA seems to have a mechanism for increasing complexity, however it got there.-Latest discoveries in evolution showing deletion of non-coding segments of DNA evolved humans away from other primates. Regulators of genes are removed for this to occur.-http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-dna-human.html

I admit that my suggestion is pure speculation, but so is yours. (Of course, I think mine fits in far better with the higgledy-piggledy, hello-goodbye, where's-this-leading evolutionary bush, not to mention the UI's apparent absence of interest in what you believe to be the main object of his attentions. But hey, I'll still grant your speculation equality with mine!)-I think we are close enough to each other to agree that DNA seems to have a mechanism for increasing complexity, however it got there. Gould's opinion that evolution could only work in one direction because it started with such simple bacteria makes no sense. Bacteria started it and are still here. With that kind of success, the biggest biomass on Earth, why bother with complexity?