It's the thing you can ponder but never see: your wake; the world if you'd never been born; or today if so-and-so hadn't died so young. For the evolutionist, it's whether life would evolve in the same way if given the chance of a do-over. Or several do-overs.
So evolution scholars dream of an experiment with a thousand Earths launched at the same time to see how chance events alter life's path through them. But lucky them, they get mini-experiments from species that evolve in parallel isolation, miles or continents away from one another.
The point of the NYT blog post linked here is that they're finding the causes for parallel or duplicate evolution may be at the genetic level: As in, it's not that "Well, the fittest adapt the best way to survive," or that "Well, of course birds without predators, in different locations, lose their ability to fly -- they don't need it!" But rather the same genes in distant species (as distant as fish and mammals, for example) mutate or express themselves in strikingly similar ways. The setting empowers the gene expression.
The explanation gets a bit technical, with proteins and gene expression and such. So take joy in the end results:
Looking around the Earth, it’s striking how often similar traits evolve in similar environments. So: birds living on remote islands typically lose the power of flight. Males in species (be they chimpanzees or yellow dung flies) where females are promiscuous tend to evolve high sperm counts and large testes.
Animals that live in caves lose their eyes and their color: whether they live in Rwanda or Romania, they’re a pallid, blind lot, the troglodytes. Mammals that specialize on eating leaves — be they cows or langurs (that’s a monkey) — have evolved foreguts where bacteria break down the leaves, as well as special enzymes to help with digestion. Amazingly, the same phenomena are also seen in the hoatzin, a leaf-eating bird from South America. In short, evolution has a remarkable tendency to repeat itself.
As you may have noticed, the site has changed. Sampa, the free-site host, did a version 2 of some sort.
Despite an FAQ that made it sound like allowing one's site to go through v.2 surgery would be okay, there were several flexibilities that surprisingly disappeared with the click of a button. (e.g. I cannot believe sidebars like this one are even narrower than before.)
And I'm told -- miraculously! -- that the conversion cannot be undone. Truth be told, I'm actually quite pissed. But free is free. Sampa has otherwise been good to me.
So I need to sort through site "features" to see how I can make do. Except that I don't have the time at the moment, in the middle of graduate classes and Lighthousehockey.com. (btw, I've removed that Lighthouse RSS feed so that you're not clogged with random Islanders hockey gibberish).
But I promise to touch up the accessories when I get a chance, and return to irregularly scheduled blogging.
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with a thousand Earths launched at the same time to see how chance events alter life's path through them. But lucky them, they get mini-experiments from species that evolve in parallel isolation, miles or continents away from one another.
Comments (2) for "Evolutionist's dream"
February, 2008