Evolution in action

[clapstyx]

I am pretty confident that I have discovered a species that is presently in a transitional stage, and that if observed in its natural environment will yield a positive answer to whether or not evolution is true or false. Thats not to say that it rules out the existence of a divine power or creation just that things tend to improve and become more suited to their changing conditions over time like a survival test. The most fitting shall remain. I have taken a photograph of the species in question however I am unable to post it here for some reason. It is of the fruit of a tree where the seed is only partially covered. I am prepared to bet a solid gold coin that the birds (and or animals) which act as the primary distribution agents will prefer the seed+fruit modules that are a combination of "Most fruit over less fruit", "Less toxic over more toxic", "smaller seed over larger seed". That is that the distribution species will choose the products of the tree which it considers most desireable to it, that these seeds will become more likely to be transported from the site of the parent tree and thus have a greater chance of survival success and that these slightly more preferable examples will cross pollinate producing cross matched benefits (ie the "smaller seed" tree matched with the "more fruit tree" and so that overtime its course of evolution will be guided by its degree of desireability and compatibility to the species which aid its survival.

 

if you would like a copy of the picture send me an email at clapstyx at bigpond.com and I will email it to you so you can see what I am talking about.

[questor]

Tormod, i read the link you furnished about speciation. i assume you also read it. did you see any references to populations that had a different species evolve from the parent? with a totally different appearance and a totally different genetic code?

[jetzeppelin]

I think I have observed natural evolution in my own lifetime. We have all heard the expression "frozen like a deer in headlights". As a kid I remember seeing deer frozen on the road in the headlights of my dad's car. But in my adult life I have never witnessed this. I have seen whole herds of deer run across the road right through the headlights, but none of them stop. My conclusion is that those deer with the tendency to stare into the lights diminished in numbers over the years as they got smacked by traffic. Those with the tendency to keep on running prospered, and passed that trait on to their offspring. My conclusion is that I have witnessed first hand the evolution of deer to the introduced risk of night time traffic.

 

Bill

 

That's not evolution in any form. That's cognitive thinking, it's learning. When I was younger I would touch a curling iron, and it would hurt. I learned then that it would hurt and would not touch a curling iron anymore. I would tell my children that and so on and so on. So it gets to the umpteenth generation of my genes and my great great... grandchild sees a curling iron and does not touch it because it knows that it will cause pain. Has my offspring evolved? I sure hope you wouldn't think that.

[bumab]

Are you saying deer teach their wee one's not to stare at bright lights? :surprise:

[TheBigDog]

That's not evolution in any form. That's cognitive thinking, it's learning. When I was younger I would touch a curling iron, and it would hurt. I learned then that it would hurt and would not touch a curling iron anymore. I would tell my children that and so on and so on. So it gets to the umpteenth generation of my genes and my great great... grandchild sees a curling iron and does not touch it because it knows that it will cause pain. Has my offspring evolved? I sure hope you wouldn't think that.

jetzepplin, I am speachless, I don't know how to respond. Let me see if I understand this logic...

 

You touched a curling iron, and it would hurt, and you learned that. So you tell your kids, and they learn from you, and they tell their kids and they learn, until one day... a child is born who, out of the womb, knows what a hot iron is and not to touch it, and nobody EVER needs to tell them that fact. That is your position?

 

Let me see if I understand you...

 

A) You are a zealot with no interest in acknowledging facts of any sort that have any remote possibility of proving of a fact that is contrary to your belief system.

 

:surprise: You have absolutly no understanding of what the priciples of Evolutionary Theory are, yet you insist upon displaying your ignorance by making foundless aruments that defy all reason.

 

Those are the 3 options as I see it. I am leaning toward A because that means you are intelligent, but have an agenda that you feel is worth fighting for - no matter how clumsily. So I will go with A. That would not be an insult. It would be a compliment. If I am wrong, my apologies. If you wish to make an argument based upon reason, I would be pleased to continue in that fashion.

 

Bill

 

(edited out option C as it was probably a rules violation)

[CraigD]

I think I have observed natural evolution in my own lifetime. We have all heard the expression "frozen like a deer in headlights". As a kid I remember seeing deer frozen on the road in the headlights of my dad's car. But in my adult life I have never witnessed this. I have seen whole herds of deer run across the road right through the headlights, but none of them stop. My conclusion is that those deer with the tendency to stare into the lights diminished in numbers over the years as they got smacked by traffic. Those with the tendency to keep on running prospered, and passed that trait on to their offspring. My conclusion is that I have witnessed first hand the evolution of deer to the introduced risk of night time traffic.

A very interesting hypothesis. Better still, I think it’s testable, if you happen to have and know how to use a gene sequencer, and a supply of old deer DNA.

 

If the hypothese is correct, there should be a gene or genes associated with the neurological trait for “freezing in the headlights” (or ones for “fleeing from the headlight”). The old (ca 1980) deer population should have many individuals with the “freezing” (or many lacking the “fleeing”) gene(s), while the gene should be rare in the present population.

 

I’ve spotted many possibly viable source of old deer DNA, in the form of the skin of many mounted deer heads (and sometimes, forelegs too), some even conveniently dated, from which no one would miss a small sample plug. Alas, I have neither access to nor knowledge of the use of a gene sequencer. :cup:

 

This brings to mind a story told me by a 7th grade teacher and avid hunter. According to him, there are many 18th century accounts of wild turkeys so unwary that settlers could walk up to an club them dead. As anyone who has hunted turkey these days can attest, the turkey is now one of the wiliest game birds one can hunt. I doubt, however, that it’s possible to get an adequate sample of 18th century turkey DNA to find the selected-for “wily” gene(s).

[TheBigDog]

A very interesting hypothesis. Better still, I think it’s testable, if you happen to have and know how to use a gene sequencer, and a supply of old deer DNA.

 

...

 

Alas, I have neither access to nor knowledge of the use of a gene sequencer. :)

At the risk of mixing my threads, as soon as I get the replicator up and running I will create a easy-to-operate gene sequencer.:cup:

 

Bill

[questor]

and after the deer learn to run, and the turkeys become wary, are they still deer and turkeys, or have they ''evolved''?

[MortenS]

Speciation is evolution, but not all evolution is speciation...

You seem to equate evolution with speciation.

[questor]

how about some examples of speciation changes? supposedly 99% of the earth's life forms have become extinct.

[MortenS]

I am most familiar with insects, so pardon me if I use examples among insects..

 

This is an example of speciation in progress, and there are many similar examples, but few that are this well studied, since this is an important pest species. Like it or not, pest species receive most research.

 

Rhagoletis pommonella is a tephritid fruit fly that lays eggs in apples, and the larvae develop inside the apples.

 

The native food resource for this fly in North America was originally the hawthorn, but in 1864 it was first noted on apples. In 1960's it appeared on cherries. Since then it has also shifted hosts to pears and a few other species of plants.

 

 

The flies are not possible to separate from each other morphologically at this time, but they have already (in about 140 generations) developed significant differences genetically and in behavior.

 

The mode of selection that is in play here is known as disruptive selection, while the mode of speciation that happens in this case is known as sympatric speciation (as the speciation takes place without geographic isolation).

 

Apples and hawthorns differs in fruiting time by about 3 weeks, so in addition to the different hosts that provide some spatial isolation between the forms, there is also temporal isolation between the forms. The apple maggot fly has just 40 days of larval development, while the hawthorn maggot fly has 55-60 days of development in the larval stages.

 

Currently, there is just 4-6% hybridization between the apple maggot flies and the hawthorn maggot flies. They are now considered to be incipient species (that is, varieties or subspecies about to form a full species).

 

The apple maggot flies and the hawthorn maggot flies are isolated mostly by prezygotic barriers (associative mating due to different host plants, but no geographic barrier, and temporal isolation due to different fruiting time and different larval development time), but some postzygotic barriers have also been found. For example, hybrids between the apple maggot flies and the hawthorn maggot flies have a reduced response to parental host-fruit odors compared to pure apple maggot fly offspring, and pure hawthorn maggot flies. This leads to a reduced ability to find the host plants of either parent, and reduce the risk of gene flow back to either of the parental populations.

 

 

Some of the sources:

Host fidelity is an effective premating barrier between sympatric races of the apple maggot fly.

 

Postzygotic isolating factor in sympatric speciation in Rhagoletis flies: reduced response of hybrids to parental host-fruit odors.

 

Allopatric genetic origins for sympatric host-plant shifts and race formation in Rhagoletis

 

Evidence for Inversion Polymorphism Related to Sympatric Host Race Formation in the Apple Maggot Fly, Rhagoletis pomonella

 

 

If you want to follow a speciation in progress, you would do well to remember the Rhagoletis pomonella complex, and revisit it every 5-10 years as the studies on this species complex are not likely to stop for a while.

 

Cheers,

[questor]

Morten, not to be flippant, but will these flies evolve into human beings, or will they remain flies? can you imagine how much genetic change had to occur over the years to cause the vast numbers of species that have existed since life began?

[MortenS]

What these flies will evolve into eventually, I have no idea about, not humans, that much is pretty sure (after all, according to evolutionary theory, we are separated by over 1200 million years: at least 600 million years back to the Cambrian explosion to the common ancestor between humans and insects and at least 600 million years back up to humans along another lineage).

 

Most likely they will evolve into other flies, as flies are a rather specialized order of insects.

 

However, there are certain families of flies that has evolved a long way from the typical fly morphology, possibly so far away that they could warrant a new rank eventually, but they are currently classified under flies.

 

Image of a louse fly: Deer fly

Image of a bee louse: Braulidae

Image of bee louse attacking a bee: Bee with bee louse

 

Unless you study them at great detail, it is unlikely that the layman will categorize braulidae as flies in the order Diptera, yet, they are solidly placed there by morphological characters. Only one protein and DNA sequence has so far been sequenced from Braulidae, so there is no solid molecular support yet for their phylogenetic position. As more and more organism get their DNA sequenced, these flies will also eventually get more and longer sequences deposited in databanks, so that molecular phylogeny studies can be done.

 

In the past, fleas have gone a similar route as these flies, from a winged fly-like ancestor (possibly from primitive mecopterans), to a wingless, laterally flattened, blood-sucking ectoparasite. This is supported via molecular phylogeny, but not yet from any fossil findings.

[MortenS]

And questor, yes, I can imagine the vast amount of genetic changes that has happened since the origin of life, and there are known molecular mechanisms to come from one sequence to another. That is not said that I know the exact phylogeny of all organisms. There are still a lot more to learn about that. Nevertheless, there are so many connections made, that the overall picture is getting clearer and clearer.

 

 

- changes to single nitrogen bases

* insertions

* deletions

* substitutions

- changes to larger sequences of nitrogen bases

* loss of genes or chromosomes

* duplications (of genes, chromosomes, genomes)

* transposons

* reversions

* fission (of chromosomes)

* fusion (of chromosomes)

 

to name just a few of the known processes that occur in genomes, some are more common than others.

[joel]

Morten,

That was a very nice little essay you posted of evolution being observed in the wild. I wonder if you'd mind me refering to it in a similar debate on another forum?

 

I think Morten's example is one of many observations of evolution in action in the natural world. I've been curious about lab experiments, and came across a fellow named Lenski who is putting selection pressures on e.coli cultures. He does genetic assays of his cultures as time goes by, and has observed mutations arising that eventually permiate the cultures. This is a demonstration of advantageous mutations that creationists so often claim is so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. As these are new fuctional genes, they can accurately be described as an addition of information to the organism's genome. Here's his home page, with references to the many papers he's published on his research over the last 20 years: http://www.msu.edu/~lenski/research.html

 

If anyone here knows of more examples, I'd appreciate hearing about them. Cheers!

[ughaibu]

MortenS: Do you have any information about flies bred on space stations?

[InfiniteNow]

...not to be flippant, but will these flies evolve into human beings, or will they remain flies?

Actually... I can.

 

Evolution has favored intelligence. Intelligence gave us greater ability to manipulate our environment for our own advantage (a drastic change from the environment doing what it wanted an us having to evolve toward it). We then began by selecting for and cross breeding plants that were beneficial, and now can order and select on a genomic level, with much more than plants, but all life.

 

Evolution just sped up by several orders of magnitude.

 

We might mix human dna with insect dna... spooky? strange? yep. Possible. yep again.

 

 

Even Bush spoke of it in the recent State of the Union address. A quote of President GWBush from the 2006 address is shown below:

I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research - human cloning in all its forms: creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator - and that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale.

 

While I would say that the last sentence demonstrates an opinion I don't share, and that we also received the gift of cloning if those are the terms you wish to use... that this Creator must also have created cloning if there is such a creator...

 

Let's not get into the religious philisophical issues debate AGAIN here...

 

 

So, although not along the normally followed evolutionary curve or timeframe, I think that the flies might just evolve into humans, or humans with the flies... relatively soon.

 

The superheroes of comic books may soon be friends/neighbors/and enemies.

 

I am batman!

Go spiderman!

Ms. Marvel and Psylocke!