Recently in Evolution Category

Science Daily reports today that

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a ‘primordial soup’ of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the ‘soup’ theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth’s chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. “We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent – one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores.”

The soup theory was proposed in 1929 when J.B.S Haldane published his influential essay on the origin of life in which he argued that UV radiation provided the energy to convert methane, ammonia and water into the first organic compounds in the oceans of the early earth. However critics of the soup theory point out that there is no sustained driving force to make anything react; and without an energy source, life as we know it can’t exist. …

Discuss.

Photograph by Dave Rintoul.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.

Late March sunset reflected in a channel of the Platte River near Gibbon, Nebraska.

Meandering channels with sandbars such as this one are critical habitat for sandhill cranes and whooping cranes migrating north; the birds roost in the river overnight, which protects them from predators such as coyotes.

This months PLoS Biology contains a review article by Floreano and Keller on studies that explore evolution using robots. It is an interesting read.

Evolution of Adaptive Behaviour in Robots by Means of Darwinian Selection

Darwin suggested that adaptation and complexity could evolve by natural selection acting successively on numerous small, heritable modifications. But is this enough? Here, we describe selected studies of experimental evolution with robots to illustrate how the process of natural selection can lead to the evolution of complex traits such as adaptive behaviours. Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism. In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly.

The glory – seen from an airplane.

Enough of biology! Another optical phenomenon. The dark line to the right is the contrail. Contrast has been enhanced.

You humans have finally finished sequencing my genome—okay, not exactly mine but a cousin’s. Some of you might be thinking about using this to clone me. But I own the copyright to myself so you can’t do anything!

I’m busy clubbin’ with some seal friends of mine right now and haven’t had the time my species needs to digest such monumental work. I recommend Matthew Cobb’s take on the giant panda genome.

Creation, the true story of Charles Darwin, based on the book by Randal Keynes, Darwin’s great-great-grandson, opens in theaters this Friday in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and D.C.

“His love for his wife, his observations of his children, his friendships with gardeners, schoolteachers and pigeon fanciers, his fears about death, revolution, bankruptcy, inbreeding … all these things found their way into his theory. He was the most inclusive of thinkers.” Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box

Support the film! The distributors will gladly link back to your organization from their Facebook and Twitter pages if you link to them. Help us spread the word.

Become a fan of Creation on Facebook.

Follow Creation on Twitter.

For theater information, check http://creationthemovie.com/.

This post was modified from a press release we received today.

Creation, the new film about Darwin featuring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, premieres in the United States on January 22, 2010, in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Boston.

LA and Boston will have advance showings.

Photograph by Dan Stodola.

Photography contest, Honorable Mention.

Uncia uncia (or Panthera uncia) - Snow Leopard, Brookfield Zoo, Illinois.

Some stunning fossil trackways have been discovered in Poland. The remarkable thing about them is that they’re very old, about 395 million years old, and they are clearly the tracks of tetrapods. Just to put that in perspective, Tiktaalik, probably the most famous specimen illustrating an early stage of the transition to land, is younger at 375 million years, but is more primitive in having less developed, more fin-like limbs. So what we’ve got is a set of footprints that tell us the actual age of the transition by vertebrates from water to land had to be much, much earlier than was expected, by tens of millions of years.

Here are the trackways. Note that what they show is distinct footprints from both the front and hind limbs, not drag marks, and all that that implies: these creatures had jointed limbs with knees and elbows and lifted them and swung them forward to plant in the mud. They were real walkers.

Photograph by Dave Thomas

Homo nivarius – evolution of the snowman.

(The following is a follow-up to a comment I made in this thread.) There is much abuzz in the ID-o-sphere regarding Stephen Meyer’s new book, “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design”. The book is a lengthy recapitulation of the main themes that ID proponents have been talking about for the past 15 years or so; indeed, there will be precious little that is new for seasoned veterans of the internet discussions and staged debates that have occurred over the years.

Long though the book is, it is built around one central theme - the idea that the genetic code harbors evidence for design. Indeed, the genetic code - the triplet-amino acid correspondence that is seen in life - is the “Signature in the Cell”. Meyer contends that the genetic code cannot have originated without the intervention of intelligence, that physics and chemistry cannot on their own accords account for the origin of the code.

It is this context that a recent paper by Yarus et al. (Yarus M, Widmann JJ, Knight R, 2009, RNA-Amino Acid Binding: A Stereochemical Era for the Genetic Code, J Mol Evol 69:406-429) merits discussion. This paper sums up several avenues of investigation into the mode of RNA-amino acid interaction, and places the body of work into an interesting light with respect to the origin of the genetic code. The bottom line, in terms that relate to Meyer’s book, is that chemistry and physics (to use Meyer’s phraseology) can account for the origin of the genetic code. In other words, the very heart of Meyer’s thesis (and his book) is wrong.

For details, follow this link, where comments may be left.

Bradley Monton thinks he understands intelligent-design creationism better than either its opponents proponents or its critics. He’s about half right.

Monton, a philosopher at the University of Colorado, has recently been making a bit of a name for himself by publicly debating ID creationism and also moderating a debate between Francisco Ayala and William Lane Craig. So I decided it was time I read his book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design from cover to cover. I am working from a proof copy that the author kindly sent me last spring, so I will not comment on minor errors. I thought the book was well and clearly written, if not always well argued, but I thought that if I saw one more instance of an awkward and wholly superfluous phrase such as “it is the case that,” I was going to scream or throw my shoe through the monitor.

Photograph by David Young.

Rosa Grandiflora “New Year” – New Year Rose, Albuquerque Botanic Garden, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Photograph by Vivian K. Dullien.

Crepuscular rays in ground blizzard, Boulder, Colorado. Photograph copyright © 2009 by Vivian K. Dullien.

Perhaps your idea of the traditional holiday week involves lounging about with a full belly watching football — not me, though. I think if I did, I’d be eyeing those muscular fellows with thoughts of muscle biopsies and analyses of the frequency of α-actinin variants in their population vs. the population of national recliner inhabitants. I’m sure there’s an interesting story there.

In case you’re wondering what α-actinin is, it’s a cytoskeletal protein that’s important in anchoring and coordinating the thin filaments of actin that criss-cross throughout your cells. It’s very important in muscle, where it’s localized in the Z-disk at the boundaries of sarcomeres, the repeated contractile units of the muscle. This diagram might help you visualize it:

Actin (green), myosin (red). Rod-like tropomyosin molecules (black lines). Thin filaments in muscle sarcomeres are anchored at the Z-disk by the cross-linking protein α-actinin (gold) and are capped by CapZ (pink squares). The thin-filament pointed ends terminate within the A band, are capped by tropomodulin (bright red). Myosin-binding-protein C (MyBP-C; yellow transverse lines).