WTF Evolution?!

Here is absolute proof that evolution has gone mental....This thing is called aptly enough a Blob fish.  There is something about evolution and funny / horrific noses.

Want more proof?  Check out this IO9 article

Why Did Early Hominids Evolve? No More Elephants!

I know!  Elephants?  What do elephants have to do  with early evolution?  According to PloS One  
It seems that  one of the major pushes along the "big brain" highway was the disappearance of of  a major food item 400k years ago.  (yep, I did say 400k, seems this little bump pushed the appearance of early hominids back a lot further than was expected!)  That food item was the elephant which in some cases may have been responsible for upwards of 60% all animal derived protein / fat and not only that, but the elephant had just the right mix of fat to protein to sustain a healthy diet.

Of course the elephant was slow and big, which for homo - erectus was perfect, plus the fact that it would sustain a larger population for far longer.  But by 400k years ago, the boogers had pretty much run the elephant to ground.  

Now this of and by itself would not prove much of anything but for a tooth.  A 400,000 year old MODERN tooth no less discovered recently in  Israel's Qesem cave.   It seems that with ample food supplies there was no pressure for Homo-E to evolve.  But with the disappearance of large slow moving food source Homo-erectus and for that matter any hominid would have to adapt or perish.

As the IO9 article puts it:

• These later, more modern hominids might have evolved from or simply replaced Homo erectus, but either way, the loss of elephants is key.

230 Million year old 4' dinosaur - predicessor to T-Rex

New research has unveiled a previously unknown carnivorous dinosaur from 230 million years ago, making it one of two of the earliest dinosaurs known. Dubbed Eodromaeus, the pint sized two legged animal fills an important niche in the story of early dinosaur evolution. Eodromaeus is the second fossil found in the same area in the same strata of rock. Almost identical to Eoraptor uncovered in the early 1990s, Eodromaeus shows evidence of being a meat eater while Eoraptor was quite possibly a plant eater. These two dinosaurs, almost identical but actually two separate species puts them both at the very dawn of dinosaur evolution when plant eaters split from their carnivorous cousins. Though the genetic lineages would continue for another 165 million years, Eodromaeus was paving the way for the mega-meat - eaters like Tyrannosaurus rex, while Eoraptor's linage led to the big plant eaters like Diplodocus and Apatosaurus.

Reuters article Mail Online article

Thanks to Dan for the Article

Oldest landwalker prints found

Tim Sayell sends in an article that details a find that is going to force a rethink on when land animals evolved.

Up until this find, the transition from fish to land animals was thought to have occurred about 380 million years ago, with the earliest complete evidence for a four-limbed animal with digits which date back to between 374 million and 359 million years ago.

Now, with the discovery of distinctive footprints, around an ancient muddy shore-line in what is now Poland, have set the clock back to about 397 million years.

According to the article:

• had bodies shaped somewhat like crocodiles, with fin-like tails and stumpy legs. And some of them were pretty big, reaching up to about 10 feet (3 meters) in length.
  

AP photo

New Skull Discovery Could Rewrite Human History

Conventional views of human evolution and expansion has held that modern humans evolved in Africa and slowly expanded into Europe and Asia already possessing a modern human body structure and large brain and sophisticated tools.

But in recent discovery, Scientists found a handful of skulls at an archaeological site in Europe, near Tbilisi Georgia. These discoveries suggest that humans evolved in Europe and Asia, possibly simultaneously with African counterparts.

One possible explanation for the ancient skulls might be that proto-humans may have moved out of Africa far longer ago than the conventional 1 million years, spread out over Europe and Asia and then slowly moved back into Africa.

Whatever the history, the bones have been dated to 1.8 million years, making them the oldest human remains found outside of Africa.

Undesirable evolution can be reversed, scientists show

But it takes repeated near exterminations, based on changed climate or by the genocidally minded, to do it.

In what almost seems like a triumph of neo-Lamarckism, Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences Professor David O. Conover has figured out how to reverse evolution in an animal species.

The Secret: want a smaller animal? Kill the largest 90% of that species, let the small survivors breed, then kill the largest 90% of their generation; repeat that through 4 generations and you'll find you have a new subspecies that grows to that size or configuration only. Want a larger animal? Kill off the smallest 90% of them for 4 succeeding generations.

Conover used the tiny fast breeding Atlantic Silverside as his evolution species. The fish travels the shorelines of the Gulf of Maine in large schools, devouring zooplankton and other small items, and themselves being consumed by striped bass, codfish and other fishes and seabirds in season. in addition to being a "forage species" for marine wildlife, it is also subject to heavy commercial exploitation as feedstock for marine aquarium fish food products.

Intensive selective harvesting of the Silversides by commercial netters, leaving the smaller fish behind, seems to have unintentionally genetically reprogrammed they and many other species to grow smaller, said lead author Conover, who subjected successive generations of the fish to the aforedescribed controlled decimations.

"We show that adaptive genetic variation in many traits is finely tuned to natural variation in climate. Much of this variation is caused by a gradient in size-selective winter mortality and involves two- to threefold changes in physiological traits that influence population productivity". ..the pool of genotypes that code for life history traits is a highly dynamic property of populations."

So, if the worst fears of the survivalist types prove true and the global trade industrial transportation system breaks down tomorrow followed by mass disease and starvation, it'll only take until the year 2088 to arrive at the new human subspecies, Homo sapiens minimis , that will be compact, agile and quick maturing. The Minis will be well suited to scavenging the apocalyptic wastelands, and like Verne's Morlocks prey on their bigger genetic relatives.

Unnatural Selection

From Shaun Saunders comes a very interesting article in New Scientist:

• Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, UK, created a robot that adapts to (environmental) changes by mimicking biological evolution.

Pretty strong statement by any definition. So just exactly are they talking about. Well at present, if you build a robotic device and then add on some other ability, you wind up having to retool and recode the whole system. The device on it's own can not make the adjustments to deal with environmental and structural changes. But MacLeod has added a wrinkle. The robot's software "brain" can automatically grows in size and complexity as its physical body develops, this is very much how biological life evolved over million of years. Macleod's robot's brain assigns new clusters of "neurons" to adapt to new additions to its body. In effect mimicking life.

Up to this point robotic scientists have used a try it, fail, succeed system for robot learning which is often slow and time consuming. MacLeod's team took this idea a step further, however, and developed an incremental evolutionary algorithm (IEA) capable of adding new parts to its robot brain over time. This new system can learn and adapt to changes and relearn functions by adding on "brains" to deal with the changes.

Read the complete New Scientist article

Robot Evolution

What if robots evolved like other life-forms? Interesting idea huh? Well here is a very interesting take on that subject in the form of a German Saturn commercial.

I have to agree with suicide bots and say very cool

Evolution may not be Random?!

Princeton researchers may have stumbled onto a discovery that has the potential for showing that Darwin"s theory of evolution may have been fundamentally flawed. In a recent IO9 article, scientists have found evidence that evolutionary changes that were thought to take place gradually and randomly, under pressure from natural selection - may in fact be influenced by here to fore unrecognized elements. Princeton scientists investigating a group of proteins that help cells burn energy have uncovered evidence that organisms actually have the ability to control their own evolution. The very idea that evolution may not be completely random flies in the face of commonly held theory. Researchers were experimenting with proteins that regulates energy use in cells. They discovered that the proteins were correcting any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations, constantly restoring the chain to working order. Analysis revealed that these proteins seem to make minute corrections all the time, steering organisms toward evolutionary changes that make the creature able to compete better.
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Humans have x-ray eyes!

I was one of those kids that dreamed what it would be like to be Super Man. Flying was the big thing, but that x-ray vision, well that had it charm, if you know what I mean. Well with the advent of personal flying devices of one type or another the flying thing has kinda lost it's shine, but there was always the vision thing. So you can imagine that I was drawn to an article in Science Daily that make a case that two forward facing eyes that one had thought were for 3d vision are in fact evolved for x-ray vision. Now I can hear you saying....I ain't got no x-ray eyes....ahh, but if we look at how your eyes work they you will understand. As the article points out forward facing eyes evolved because of a busy or cluttered environment. Not only was it important to see how far away something was but also what existed around and behind obstructions. So our eyes and brains evolved to literally see "through" obstructions. As the article describes:

• Demonstrating our X-ray ability is fairly simple: hold a pen vertically and look at something far beyond it. If you first close one eye, and then the other, you'll see that in each case the pen blocks your view. If you open both eyes, however, you can see through the pen to the world behind it.

TADA! another step closer to superman!

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Humans almost went extinct!

CNN is reporting findings that were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, reporting that early human populations may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago. It is estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000, reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought. Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago, and researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups that developed independently. Recovering from this population bottleneck seems to have brought about migrations to other parts of the world which appears to have begun about 60,000 years ago.

Modern Beetles Predate Dinosaurs

From AOL News online

New research hints that modern-day versions of the insects are far older than any tyrannosaur that trod the Earth. The vast amount of beetle species were thought to have arisen 140 million years ago, during the rise of flowering plants. But the new study of beetle DNA and fossils, published in the journal Science, pushes their appearance back to 300 million years ago. To date: 350,000 species of beetles have been cataloged around the world, and millions more are estimated to exist but haven't been discovered — which means they make up more than one-fourth of all known species of life forms. The reason for this tremendous diversity has been debated by scientists for many years but never resolved. However given the new "age" of the species and geological evidence of constantly changing environments, scientists now consider the large number of beetle species existing today could very well be a direct result of early evolutionary success.

Chimps 'more evolved' than humans

Humans, it seems, have been taken down a notch or rung on the evolutionary ladder!
Chimpanzees are the more highly evolved species, according to new research. Evolutionary geneticists at the University of Michigan compared DNA sequences for 13,888 genes shared by human, chimp and rhesus macaques. The research team found that 233 chimp genes, compared with only 154 human ones, have been changed by selection since chimps and humans split from their common ancestor about 6 million years ago.

Click here for more info

submitted by Shaun A. Saunders

Why Aren't Humans Furry?

A prize-winning paper suggests that humans are hairless apes because Stone-Age mothers regarded furry babies as unattractive. Written by Judith Rich-Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike, the article, "Parental selection: a third selection process in the evolution of human hairlessness and skin color. Harris' theory is that this kind of parental selection may have been an important force in evolution. If Stone Age people believed that hairless babies were more attractive than hairy ones, this could explain why humans are the only apes lacking a coat of fur. Harris suggests that Neanderthals must have been furry in order to survive the Ice Age. Our species would have seen them as "animals" and potential prey. Harris' hypothesis continues that Neanderthals went extinct because human ancestors ate them.

Mass Extinction Changed Ecology of Earth's Oceans

The earth experienced its biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago, an event that wiped out an estimated 95% of marine species and 70% of land species. New research shows that this mass extinction did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans. Ecologically simple marine communities were largely displaced by complex communities - higher-metabolism, mobile organisms (such as snails, clams and crabs) that actually go out and find their own food and the decreased diversity of older groups of low-metabolism, stationary organisms (such as lamp shells and sea lilies) that filter nutrients from the water.

Our Mushrooms, Our Selves

In a report published Oct. 19 in the journal Nature researchers outlined evidence that the ancestors of mushrooms, lichens and various other fungi may have lost their original wiggling taillike "flagellae" on several different occasions as they evolved from water to land environments while branching off from animals in the process.