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Resurrection Ecology Gives Life to Old Eggs
Ant writes "ABC News reports that scientists are bringing the past to life by hatching eggs once thought to be dead and producing colonies of animals as they existed decades ago. They are calling it 'resurrection ecology,' and it's a whole new field that quite literally allows scientists to observe evolution as it occurred, using animals that were quite different than their kinfolk today."
More SEA MONKEYS!
http://ut.water.usgs.gov/shrimp/ "The life cycle of Artemia begins from a dormant cyst that contains an embryo in a suspended state of metabolism (known as diapause). The cysts are very hardy and may remain viable for many years if kept dry."
As the article says (in the headline, at least), scientists made dormant eggs hatch by putting them under the right conditions. "They found that eggs that had been trapped beneath the sediment years ago had never hatched, but miraculously, were still alive."
It may be a landmark - I have no idea - but it's not resurrection.
The Theory of Evolution is not about wether evolution exists or not, it is about the process by which it occurs. It is a fact that evolution exists and happens, in the same way that gravity exists and various theories about gravity are not theories about the existence of gravity, but how it happens. The LAW of gravity does not state anything about what causes gravity, it simply describes the effect of gravity.
But speciation has been observed. The Australian Eastern Rosella had a range extending from near Adelaide in South Australia to the Macpherson Ranges in SE Queensland. The sprcies had a continuous variation in colouring though this range from SW to NE. You could take a pair of birds of opposite gender and they would mate without needing any particular prompting.
In the 1930's the Murrumbidgee Irragation Project destroyed a large slab of habitat in the center of the range of the bird. There were now two populations of Eastern Rosellas. In each group colouration tended to the mean of each region, with the result that now birds of opposite gender from the two regions will not interbreed without major human intervention (colouring the birds, or feeding them sex hormones etc).
Given that the definition of species is a population of organisms that will mate and reproduce spontaneously under natural conditions, the Eastern Rosella is a text book case of Speciation, as outlined in the Origin of Species.
The "no new species have been observed" objection is dead in the water. Note also that we're not talking about plankton or bacteria or virus here - we are talking about a parrot a bit bigger than a pidgeon.
I refer you to http://www.birdsaustralia.com.au/aoc/ , in the 2001 conference, paper 61 "Evolutionary Isolates and Cryptic Species in Australian Birds, Basis Nature: What to call Species" for a reasonably recent discussion of this issue.
However I was first aware of this in 1992, I can't recall the original source, but it was fairly well known in Population Ecology Circles in Australia at the time.
I can also refer you to www.geocities.com/pb56_au/mtbuffalo/ student/activities/speciation.PDF which illustrates the debate on this issue. Note that the species in central NSW have vanished, so in the map in this document imagine varieties that filled the concave side of the curved range shown.
You are of cource correct that my "definition" was too lax, and I'll accept your correction on this. It doesnt dilute the point I was making however.