What clues would you expect to find in a designed species??

[Grimlock]

Lets for the fun of it say that I travel to another planet in a makeshift time and space machine, now on this planet there are a few indigenous species, but being in a Frankenstein I decide to create my own.

And so I do a species that is "perfectly" adapted to the climate on this planet and in almost every way superior to the indigenous species, but as a clever little safety I make it so the species can evolve naturally along with the rest of the indigenous species here so they aren,´t locked in this form.

I create enough of my new species for there to be enough to survive.

And then I leave them and forget about them.

Years later my great great great Grandchild gets wind of my little experiment back then, and travels to the same planet though when he arrives it has been 1 or 2 million years since I made my original.
The species I originally created has changed so naturally he doesn,´t know which ones his mad great great grandfather made all those years ago.

So he goes out to test the different species out there only biological dna rna chromosomes and so forth.

Now what clues would he find that would separate the "designed" species from the indigenous one.

I myself would imagine that it would be in the DNA the main clue would be.

But what clues would they be?

 

[PuppetXeno]

I expect orderly sequenced DNA and a pool of likewise orderly sequenced excess DNA for mutation-experimentation or whatever to call it. I would've said, I'd expect a serial number per chromosome or a signature, but a million years of mutation may distort or even fully erase those.

Just like the original orderly sequenced DNA will likely have been partially distorted, it will still be obviously very orderly.

Also, the idea of playing frankenstein with other planets isn't completely weird. A situation I can think of is the use of microbes for terraforming a planet's atmosphere.. These microbes would have to be specifically genetically adjusted to the specific environment in order to do just what they're supposed to. Although that involves adjusting an existing lifeform's DNA instead of sequencing an entire complex lifeform up from scratch.

 

[ebbixx]

But what clues would they be?

You wouldn't need to look for DNA. Just look for the species that most resembles gramps. /snark

 

[felixthecoach]

Giraffes to have proper axons and neural pathways instead of the ones they have leading all the way down their neck and back up the other side of their spine....just thinking a designer would have thought through how useless and unplanned that kind of neck design is.

 

[Spase]

Well...

There's the question of what you mean by design. Do you mean that you basically wrote this species' code up from scratch? I kind of assume so given the context.

If that's the case it should be a simple enough matter to sequence a few genomes including the one you designed (or more accurately, the progeny of your design) and play "Which of these doesn't belong." There are common structures between all life we have sequenced so far. The ribosome is the best example I know of. It's what you look for mutations in between *extremely* distantly related life forms in order to try to estimate how long ago the lineages diverged because mutation in it is so infrequent. In short, there should be structures that are conserved in all life except your designed life.

Depending on your method of design there may not be a lot of evolution in your species. I was just thinking about this and it's possible that a designed species would be much slower moving because it's design would be less modular. Also earth critters have systems by which certain kinds of mutations and genetic mixing is encouraged by our molecular machinery. If you designed a species to reproduce efficiently with very few copy errors and only a single well developed version of every allele there's some question about it's potential for effective evolution.

The issue would be genetic diversity. In humans and other critters inbreeding is frowned upon because it reduces genetic diversity bringing out recessive defects like hemophilia but in a designed species unless you built it into them there isn't likely to *be* a lot of genetic diversity at first... Depending on your design philosophy your critters might not really evolve since we have evolution built into our machinery in the way our parent's DNA recombines when we produce egg and sperm cells.

I really don't know... so much of how we work is defined by the fact we arose from a long sloppy process that it's hard for me to imagine the details of design and what it would even look like. It's easy enough to imagine structures such as communication via radio that could be built into something designed... or a programmed behavior mine and refine gold using secreted acids and enzymes for a random example...

Genetic comparison with other life on the planet seems the most straightforward. If you created multiple species of life on a planet without indigenous life it would be a harder problem... then it really comes down to "I don't know... the concept of designed life implies motive and depending on motive design could be painfully obvious or subtle."

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Short of a signature?

Maybe an elimination of a big chunk of the junk?

 

[Perpetuated]

I'd expect some degree of 'futureproofing.'

If we look at humankind now, the general affluence of the West has led to outbreaks of obesity. Surely, an intelligent designer would have forseen a potentially comfortable future in which many lifestyles became sedentary and food easily available; an end to the hunter-gatherer era?

 

[Canto]

If somthing was perfectly designed, you wouldnt expect to see any changes whatsoever. You also wouldnt expect to see a vast array of such creatures. I would expect to find that a single designed species in an environment full of undesigned species would be the dominant species as you said that you designed them to be better than most of the native species.

I think the arguement for design falls apart simply because if you were designed then you are limited. Designing anything only works because of the specific tasks you have in mind for the object to do. Lets look at a seesaw, flat board on a pivot point in the middle. It is designed so that you put a kid on each end and they can push eachother up and down. The object for this design is fun. If the pivot point gets shifted in either direction, the seesaw becomes far less fun. Even in a multipurpose design, the object sacrifices the efficiency of being good at one thing for being capable of doing more than one thing(think Spork, fork good for noodles, spoon good for soup, spork less efficient for both).

As to your question, I think its rather pointless as the second a mutation of and kind occurs your designed object is no longer the object you designed. It becomes somthing different. The only way to maintain a design is to remove any chance of change by destroying anything that does change from the design you made so that the change cant invalidate your design. Would you recognize your design if you made it so that it would evolve? Probably not. You could put your name in the genetic sequence of the original, but one mutation where your name resides could render your name into somthing else. I don't think evolution and design can coexist in any fashion, nor would you be able to recognize design 2 million years later.

 

[Ozymandyus]

There would be lots of clues. The comparison between the native species and the created ones would show many many differences. Shared viral insertions, common protein formations, a myriad of vestigial traits that none of the newcomers would share with the natives.

A quick cladogram listing as comprehensively as possible the traits of the different species would lead to a nested set which would show which group belonged to which. Genetic testing looking for the sorts of shared genetic markers could confirm the sets.

I believe wholeheartedly that it would be immediately intuitively obvious as well... unless your grandfather purposefully used the species already living there and modified them. Even then it would be immediately intuitively obvious, like knowing a mammal from a lizard.

Of course, if it was really perfectly designed and superior in every way from the native species, you would only find the new species anyway. They would have outcompeted the nearly all the old species completely.

 

[GoodKat]

I don't think evolution and design can coexist in any fashion, nor would you be able to recognize design 2 million years later.

I don't know, even if your design diverged into several species, the most basic shared traits among the similarly complex organisms of the planet shouldn't be present in the descendants of your design, and their most basic shared traits wouldn't be present in any other group, unless of course you purposely designed them that way.

 

[TheJilvin]

There are a few things I would do.

First, I would check to see if the genetic material is even the same. Second, I would run rougher morphological comparisons to find a miscorrelation. Even if there was such a bad miscorrelation it wouldn't indicate anything potent.


The best thing that could possibly be conducted would to be to run a phylogenetic analysis of the species and examine the hierarchy. Unless your 100000x great grandfather decided to place it into an objective nested heirarchy, then the species will completely defy the defining traits of all taxa already on the planet, and will be completely outside any other taxa, considering that it wasn't designed with inspiration from any of the organisms already on the planet.

 

[Canto]

I don't know, even if your design diverged into several species, the most basic shared traits among the similarly complex organisms of the planet shouldn't be present in the descendants of your design, and their most basic shared traits wouldn't be present in any other group, unless of course you purposely designed them that way.

If you were designing life to fit into a preexisting ecosystem, wouldn't you need to make that life as close to what is there as possible to ensure its survival? The genetics would need to be fairly compatible in some ways for the designed organism to survive since it would have to cope with eating the same food sources as the rest of the ecosystems population without negative side effects. The organisms immune system would need to copy much of what already exists within the ecosystem if you expect it to survive. Not to mention that a fully formed organism would need extensive knowledge/ingrained traits to know what is harmful to it, what predators it has to watch out for, what prey it is capable of catching and eating. It would need some knowledge of seasonal patterns and how to cope with them. As far as I can tell, much of these are traits animals posess not because they were implanted in them, but which were ingrained into the species over time as they changed to fit the environment. Any designed from scratch organism would need such a large advantage over the preexisting ecosystem that introducing it into the ecosystem would have devastating effects on the indigenous population. Designing new life from the human perspective has so much going against it in my mind that it would be a huge undertaking.

I am assuming that the organism the OP is talking about was designed from scratch and not based on any existing organism within the ecosystem. If the organism was just a modified version of somthing that already existed within the ecosystem then I really cant see how you would recognize it as designed life.

I stand by my earlier opinion that design and evolution can't coexist.

 

[edib0y]

I would expect much shorter DNA, without usless junk. Also the being would be very simple and efficient, easily repairable - things wouldn't be done "trough ass"(unless your grandpa was French)

 

[ImprobableJoe]

You know, I was thinking about this subject in relation to Lego blocks. DNA is like building blocks, after all. All life is made from strands of the stuff, organizing other stuff, but all from the same basic nucleotides at the heart of it. No analogy is perfect, especially not this one...

Now, imagine if everything that is "made" on earth were made of Legos. Your TV, your car, airplanes, refrigerators, lawn chairs, houses... I guess Legos could maybe work for all of those things, but they wouldn't work very well for most things. Certainly, you wouldn't call Legos an example of "perfect design" when it is clear that better design would match the materials to the need. Legos can be made to sort of conform to all sorts of shapes, but it isn't ideal for anything. You'd want plastics, but also metals and glass and carbon polymers and all sorts of other designed things, and you would expect to see them in things that are designed. Plus, airplanes wouldn't just be cars with wings like in a Lego set... they would have their own unique design.

It is the same thing with life. It is all made of the same stuff, mostly follows one of a few main forms in the higher animals, and seems to shape itself to the environment rather than be designed for it in any way. If animals were designed by some master creator, each animal would use unique materials and designs in order to best fit the environment. It wouldn't be considered a sign of exceptional design to make dogs, cats, and birds all from the same basic blueprint. I guess you could call it design, but that designer would be deeply flawed and extremely limited in ability... like someone playing with Legos, come to think of it.

 

[Canto]

Another part of this thought excersize that bothered me is what would the organism be.

If we're talking single celled organisms, then Yes, you would expect your design to be noticeable millions to billions of years later. The chances of your single celled organism becoming dominant and not being absorbed into the ecosystem is most likely good especially when you consider that you made it slightly better than its competition.

I do not think that the same would hold true for the introduction of complex multicellular organisms. But I'm not totally sure on why I think that. It just seems to me that the design process gets unfathomably complicated as you start adding systems that need to work together to survive to an organism. But feel free to dismiss this as an arguement from ignorance. Maybe I'm thinking more along the lines of reverse irriducable complexity here?

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I do not think that the same would hold true for the introduction of complex multicellular organisms. But I'm not totally sure on why I think that. It just seems to me that the design process gets unfathomably complicated as you start adding systems that need to work together to survive to an organism. But feel free to dismiss this as an arguement from ignorance. Maybe I'm thinking more along the lines of reverse irriducable complexity here?

I'm thinking that it is a sure sign of a lack of design Instead of "irreducible complexity" think unnecessary complexity. Why would an impossibly powerful designer include ANY complexity?

 

[Cryogeneric]

An eye that could see UV radiation or electromagnetic fields would be of great use.

 

[Canto]

I'm thinking that it is a sure sign of a lack of design Instead of "irreducible complexity" think unnecessary complexity. Why would an impossibly powerful designer include ANY complexity?

Seems to me that instead of designing life, it would be easier to change the ecosystem subtley over time to try and force a prexisting organism to evolve in a more directed manner. Using nylonase as a guide for changing the ecosystem we could "force" similar changes on to other organisms. This would be a type of "design" that I could see being feasible and that would leave many clues behind. Turning an organism into somthing that is strictly beneficial for the designer would give the impression that it was made specifically for that purpose. I realize I'm pushing close to somthing that sounds like creationist junk here, but bear with me. I'm going to take somthing from the Star Wars books and use it as an analogy to what I'm saying. If you read the books, there are extragalactic invaders called the Yuuzhan Vong. They have genetically modified numerous organisms to act as weapons, factories, clothing, food sources, and everything else a person would need. This would demonstrate design. Taking a creature with naturally strong pincers and genetically changing them to act as living restraints would be a clue to the organism being "designed" but not in the strictest of terms. This may be muddled, but it's almost 2am and my brain went to bed without me.

 

[felixthecoach]

Canto, that's a pretty good analogy for 2AM. I wanna read that star wars book, but i cant because i'm in a star trek love affair.

 

[Ozymandyus]

You are thinking far too far inside the box Canto. Assuming this person was technologically advanced enough to create a perfectly adapted species in the first place, there is little doubt that it would be easy to spot And would easily outcompete every other native species.

If I were to design such a species, and I had much more advanced tech at my disposal, I would almost definitely use a self replicating machine of some kind rather than whatever form of life might be on that planet. Of course a self replicating machine is basically all any life is, so I should specify that I mean something resembling robotics/computers.

It would be able to survive in many different climates by default, unlike most forms of life, and could have an easily adaptable meta-evolution of mutating and replicating information, namely, its programs. I would give it mechanisms and programs for making itself out of different materials, whatever is available, and it would have systems for processing all those different materials in whatever ways to make more of itself and repair itself. This sort of self replicating machine will probably be available only a few years down the road. It could literally force beneficial mutations on its future generations by observing processing and solving its limitations. It would be mostly immune to whatever lifeforms were already on the planet.

Thats just one easy to comprehend possibility. If we are able to design species down to each molecule, we could do something much cooler and more perfectly adapted than this even. In a few thousand years we will undoubtedly be able to make things that can create carbon nanotubes and use them in all kinds of different ways.. a carbon nanotube based lifeform would rock.... or tons of other possibilities. Basically, any created species would be what we now would call nanotechnology - and the possibilities for making it super adaptable to all kinds of conditions are near limitless.