Appreciating evolution on Darwin's 200th birthday »
Posted By smithichie 10 months, 3 weeks ago in Science & TechnologyOn the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, we step back to appreciate how the theory he first proposed has shaped science well after his death.
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smithichie
Human, advocator of critical thought, stirrer of the pot, rocker of boats, smart-ass.
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smithichie10 months, 3 weeks ago
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"Evolution acts through the accumulation of gradual change, but the end results of those changes can sometimes revolutionize the history of life. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of endosymbiosis, the process by which bacterial prey became the energy factories—mitochondria and chloroplasts—of complex cells, including all animals and plants. We can't study that original event, but we can apparently study modern versions of it. Researchers have found an organism that looks like an amoeba, with one key difference: it has a photosynthetic bacteria living in it. Its closest relatives eat these bacteria, but Paulinella seems to have wound up using them to harvest energy from the sun, instead.
Again, this highlights how small steps make for a big leap. Paulinella and its cyanobacterial resident coordinate cell divisions, but the bacteria retains a nearly complete genome, including genes for nitrogen fixation that it no longer needs". -
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smithichie10 months, 3 weeks ago
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"Evolution has also influenced cancer research, as the basic principles—random mutation and selective pressure—explain how cancer cells evolve the capacity for unrestrained growth. In two recent cases—one in dogs and another in Tasmanian devils—the cancer has evolved a step beyond growth, and has evolved into an infectious agent, spreading from host to host. Again, there were lots of small changes that formed a cancer, and then a series of additional ones that let it hop to new hosts and evade their immune system, but the end result was a huge leap: what started out as a single cell in a large organism has now achieved a sort of immortality.
One interesting twist in the story is that, in Tasmanian devils, the disease's lethality is creating a selective pressure for early fertility, one that is likely to force its host to evolve". -
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smithichie10 months, 3 weeks ago
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"The discovery of Tiktaalik, based on predictions derived from evolutionary theory, was the most famous, but hardly the only example. It was joined by more complete skeletons from Ventastega and Australia's own Gogonasus, all of which built on a series of older discoveries to provide something resembling a time-lapse series of fossils that chronicle the major skeletal changes that produced the features that now define tetrapods. The rearrangement of fin elements into a wrist, the appearance of finger-like rays, the evolution of the first shoulder elements, and the gradual reshaping of the skull to allow the nostrils to take in air and the neck to flex—all of it took place gradually in a series of animals that, were we to see them today, would simply strike us as odd looking fish". -
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